We buy trucks in Etowah

Etowah carries a rail yard operated by CSX Transportation, 1.46 miles from the middle of town. It is the only rail-yard row filed under Etowah.

It is not the only one in the county. McMinn holds five rows in all: this yard, a second at Calhoun, and three limestone quarries — Athens with five people on it, Calhoun with seven and Englewood with two. Fourteen people across the three, which tells you the stone side of this county is a set of small operations rather than one big one.

For a seller that matters more than it sounds. A county of small pits and two yards is a county where trucks change hands locally and quietly, and where a machine can sit a long while between owners.

The yard at Calhoun sits 0.42 miles from the middle of that village, which puts it inside the place. This one does not. At 1.46 miles the Etowah yard falls outside that radius, and it is attached to this town by a fallback rule instead: of all the town centres in the state, Etowah’s is the nearest.

Nearest-centroid is the weakest of the joins in this dataset. It is very probably right here — the yard carries the town’s own name — but it is a different kind of claim from a measured one, and the pages in this lane say which kind they are making.

The coordinate itself is the mean of a track polyline’s vertices rather than a surveyed point, and the commodities moving through could not be determined from anything we read. Absence of a fact is not a fact about absence.

Those caveats aside, one figure here is measured and worth carrying. McMinn County posts 5 of its 122 county-maintained bridges — 4.1 per cent, against a statewide county-maintained rate of 12.9. On the county figures this is one of the easier places in the state to move a loaded vehicle.

The circle around this particular yard was not measured, so no count of postings within ten miles of Etowah is given here. What can be said is the county rate, and that it is an average across the county rather than a reading of the roads around this yard. The two circles that were measured in this county sit around the Athens Quarry and the Calhoun Quarry, and both are on their own pages.

FHWA National Bridge Inventory 2025, Tennessee file, item 41, county totals. Tennessee codes item 41 more broadly than neighbouring states, so the true count of load restrictions is lower than the posted count suggests.

Whatever moves through the yard, the weight rules that govern the trucks around it are the state’s own.

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. Those are the numbers every loaded truck in this state runs against, whatever it is carrying.

Subsection (b)(7) grants a ten per cent margin of error on the weighing to eleven named trades — logging, sand, coal, clay, shale, phosphate, solid waste, recovered materials, farm trucks and machinery trucks among them — and only off the interstate system. Tenn. Code § 47-26-812 adds an axle-citation shield and five hundred pounds for a natural resources load, off the interstate again. Whether a given load qualifies is a question about the commodity, not about the truck.

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. § 55-7-203 and § 55-7-104, and Tenn. Code § 47-26-812, as summarised by the University of Tennessee County Technical Assistance Service. Information, not legal advice.

The paperwork is one sentence: we need a title unless the truck is old enough that it never had one.

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.

So we take all of it. Day cabs, road tractors, box trucks, straight trucks, flatbeds, rollbacks, tankers, service bodies, work trucks and pickups. Tandem dumps and aggregate haulers too — the Athens Quarry, the Calhoun Quarry and the Englewood Quarry are all in McMinn County, and their iron ends up on the same market as anyone else’s.

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.
• Does it matter that it is not a quarry truck?No. We buy on what the truck is and whether it is complete, not on what it hauled.
• Do you buy across the county?Yes — the Athens Quarry, the Calhoun Quarry, the Englewood Quarry and everywhere between. McMinn County is one market to us.
• How do you pay?Cash or electronic payment, whichever suits you.

Beyond that, the reasons are the ordinary ones. Retiring. A medical that went the wrong way. A contract finishing and the plant that served it having nowhere to go next. In a county of small operations, a truck often outlasts the business that bought it.

The yards around this county, from the Calhoun Quarry across to the Athens Quarry, usually have one standing that never got its next job.

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. That’s what we’re here for.