We buy trucks in Bruceton

One rail-yard row is filed under this town and it carries the town’s own name. The operator of record is CSX Transportation, and the coordinate lies 0.54 miles from the centroid — inside the place, not attached to it from outside.

That distinction does real work. This state carries 55 rail-yard rows in the node list. Forty-six of them sit inside the place they are filed under. Nine are attached from outside by nearest-centroid fallback, ranging from 1.46 miles at Etowah out to 11.5 miles at a Memphis intermodal terminal. Only five rows in the whole state sit closer to their own town centre than this one does.

So when this page says the yard is here, it means here. That is not true of every page in this state and it is worth stating where it is.

That row is one of a fairly concentrated set. Across the 55 rail-yard rows in this state, CSX Transportation holds nineteen and Norfolk Southern holds nineteen — thirty-eight between them — with Canadian National at four, BNSF Railway at three, Union Pacific at one, and the rest spread one and two at a time across short lines and one federal operator.

For somebody buying a truck that is useful. Rail-served work in this state is mostly organised around two national railroads, which means two sets of yard practices, two gate regimes and two fairly consistent duty cycles rather than a dozen. A machine off one of them is comparable with a machine off the other in a way that would not hold if the map were fragmented.

This one is on the CSX side of that split, half a mile from the middle of town.

None of that tells you what the yard actually handles. The commodities could not be determined from any source read for the batch that produced this row, and we are not going to guess at a railroad’s traffic to fill a paragraph.

Two more things about the record are worth knowing before anyone leans on it. The coordinate is a derived point rather than a surveyed one — the mean of the vertices of a track polyline, which is how all 2,459 rail-yard rows in the list are located — so the 0.54 miles is the distance to a computed centre of some track, not to a gate.

And the 75 mile service radius carried with the row is a constant applied across the whole slice and flagged as an estimate. It is not a measurement of this yard’s catchment and nothing here treats it as one.

Those gaps do not reach the law, which is the same here as everywhere in the state.

Tenn. Code Ann. § 55-7-203 sets 80,000 lb gross, 20,000 lb on a single axle and 34,000 lb on a tandem, with up to 550 lb more for emissions-reduction equipment. Subsection (b)(7) grants a ten per cent margin of error on the weighing to logging, sand, coal, clay, shale, phosphate, solid waste, recovered materials, farm trucks and machinery trucks — off the interstate system only. Crushed stone is absent, and so are limestone, aggregate and gravel.

§ 55-7-103 lets the department set a lower maximum between 15 January and 15 April, and at any other time for repairs, weather or recent construction, with a week’s notice posted at the termini of the road and at every detour.

And § 55-7-104 is the one that costs a working day: an overweight vehicle may not be moved until the load is reduced into compliance or a permit obtained, and failing to comply is itself a Class C misdemeanour.

Tenn. Code Ann. §§ 55-7-103, 55-7-104 and 55-7-203, as summarised by the University of Tennessee County Technical Assistance Service. Information, not legal advice.

Beyond the weight rules, the paperwork is one sentence.

Everything after that sentence is a fix rather than a category. A lost title has a counter replacement. Where none exists there is a bonded route. Neither one stops a sale.

The salvage rule is the one people repeat wrongly. Tennessee’s salvage and rebuilt part is built on the term passenger motor vehicle, and § 55-3-201 defines that as a vehicle ten model years old or less which, if it is a light-duty truck or a multipurpose vehicle, is rated at not more than nine thousand pounds gross.

So the seventy-five per cent threshold does not reach a truck rated above nine thousand pounds at any age, and does not reach a vehicle of any kind over ten model years old. Those limbs describe the class the part governs rather than exceptions inside it. Whether some other provision reaches such a vehicle was not determined and is not claimed here.

Tenn. Code Ann. § 55-3-201 and § 55-3-211, with the Tennessee Department of Revenue’s guidance. Information, not legal advice, and only as current as the day those were read.

Both of those cover every kind of iron we buy, and around a yard 0.54 miles from the middle of town that is a wide range. Day cabs and road tractors on the drayage. Flatbeds, box trucks and straight trucks loading off it.

Dump trucks, aggregate haulers, tankers, rollbacks, service bodies, work trucks and pickups as well — not a CSX Transportation or Norfolk Southern thing in particular, and they run everywhere, and plenty of them never go near a ramp.

Whatever you drive, the offer doesn’t change. We buy all of them.

• Does it have to run?No. It does have to be complete — if the engine, transmission, doors, rear ends, drive shafts, wheels or anything under the hood have been removed, we can’t buy it. Rust is not a disqualifier.
• The engine is out of it. Is that different?Yes, and that is the line. A tired engine is fine; an engine that has been pulled and sold means we can’t buy the truck.
• What about the title?We need one unless the truck is old enough that it never had one. Lost titles have a counter replacement, and where none exists there is a bonded route.
• It only ever ran round the town.With the yard 0.54 miles from the centroid, plenty of trucks here did exactly that. Short repetitive work ages clutch, brakes and suspension ahead of the engine, and we would rather hear the hours than the miles.
• Do you only buy rail-served trucks?No. The rail row is what the data holds for this town, not a description of who we buy from. Farm, building and haulage trucks with no connection to the yard are the same deal.
• Does it matter which railroad?Not to us. CSX Transportation holds this row and Norfolk Southern holds nineteen others in the state. The nearest yard being 0.54 miles away or 11.5 does not change the offer either.
• How do you pay?Cash or electronic payment, whichever suits you.

Neither the yard nor the carrier split is usually the reason. The reasons here are ordinary ones. Retiring. A medical that went the wrong way. A haulage contract finishing and the truck that served it having nowhere to go next.

In a town where the work is 0.54 miles away there is a version of it that is almost domestic: the truck is parked at the house, it has been parked there since the contract ended, and moving it has been on the list for a year. That is most of the calls we get.

We buy from both sides of that split — the CSX Transportation towns and the Norfolk Southern ones — and from the towns with no yard in them at all.

Most of those aren’t happy reasons, and we don’t treat them like they are. Somebody wants a straight answer and the truck gone by the end of the week. That’s what we’re here for.