Washington County
A shortline yard, and a name that agrees with itself three ways
The yard here is recorded with operator the East Tennessee Railway, which is a shortline rather than one of the big systems — and that is worth noticing, because most of the rail rows in this state carry a Class I name instead. Its coordinate lies 2.63 miles from the middle of the city, inside it.
The row is named for the city, attached to the city, and contained by the city. Name, attachment and containing place all agree, which is less common in this data than it ought to be. It is also one of the rows that a slug fault in this project’s own tooling would once have reported wrongly, precisely because the census name ends in the word city; the lookup here was made with the corrected tool.
Beyond the yard, Washington County holds two more rows and neither is like it: a National Guard installation at Gray and a five-person limestone quarry at Jonesborough. Three rows, three trades, and no single local fleet to generalise about.
What moves through it, we could not establish
That is the honest position on the freight. The commodities handled at this yard could not be determined from any source read for this work, so nothing is claimed about them, and the East Tennessee Railway being a shortline does not narrow it in the way a bulk terminal would.
The coordinate is the mean of a track polyline’s vertices rather than a surveyed facility point — all 2,459 rail-yard rows carry that derivation — and the working radius attached to it, 75 miles, is a slice-wide constant flagged as an estimate. The 2.63 miles is measured. The 75 miles is not.
Absence of a fact is not a fact about absence, and a yard whose traffic we could not read is not a quiet yard. It is an unread one.
What we can say about the trucks, which is the point of the page
Beyond the yard itself, this is the largest place in its county and the commercial fleet around it reflects that rather than any one industry: day cabs and road tractors, box and straight trucks, flatbeds and rollbacks, service bodies, tippers on building work, and the tandem dumps that run to the Locust Mount Quarry at Jonesborough.
We buy every one of those on the same terms. What the truck is and whether it is complete is what decides it.
One measured thing about the roads is worth carrying, because it shapes how a machine here was worked: Washington County posts 20 of its 105 county-maintained bridges, 19.0 per cent against a statewide county-maintained rate of 12.9, which puts route knowledge ahead of payload and turns some of the mileage on a local truck into detour rather than delivery.
Tennessee weight law
The ceilings, the eleven trades, and the rule that costs a day
Whatever the load, the ceilings over it are the state’s and they do not vary by county.
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 ceilings hold for every loaded truck in the state, whatever it is carrying and wherever it loaded.
Subsection (b)(7) then 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. The relief attaches to the commodity rather than to the vehicle, so what a truck is carrying decides it.
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.
Tennessee paperwork
We need a title — unless it never had one
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.
What we buy here
So the list is a broad one. Day cabs, road tractors, box trucks, straight trucks, flatbeds, rollbacks, tankers, service bodies, work trucks and pickups. Tandem dumps too, including whatever runs to the Locust Mount Quarry over at Jonesborough.
Whatever you drive, the offer doesn’t change. We buy all of them.
We buy complete trucks. If the engine, transmission, doors, rear ends, drive shafts, wheels or anything under the hood have been removed, we can’t buy it. Small things — a missing bumper — are fine.
Straight answers
The questions we get asked in Johnson City
- 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.
- Do you buy outside the city?Yes — across Washington County and well beyond it, including Gray and Jonesborough.
- High miles on a truck that worked locally.Worth mentioning that Washington County posts nearly one county bridge in five, so some of that mileage is route rather than load. It is not the same wear as loaded distance.
- How do you pay?Cash or electronic payment, whichever suits you.
Why people call
Beyond all of that, the reasons here are the ordinary ones. Retiring. A medical that went the wrong way. A contract finishing and the truck that served it having nowhere to go next.
The yards around Washington County, from here out towards Gray and the Locust Mount Quarry at Jonesborough, 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.