We buy trucks in Knoxville

The node list gives five quarry names around Knoxville and they read as five unrelated businesses: Everett Road, Riverside Drive, Heiskell I-75, Mascot, John Sevier Highway. TDOT’s own producer register groups them differently. Vulcan Materials holds two of them and Martin Marietta holds three, and that is all five.

Three sit close enough to be filed under this city. The John Sevier Highway source is 6.96 miles out with sixteen people on it, Heiskell I-75 is 10.40 miles out with twelve, and Riverside Drive is 2.72 miles out with nine.

There is a cement plant as well. CEMEX runs it and reports 147 employees to MSHA, which is more people than the three quarries put together. Four rail yards are filed here too — Coster, Coster Bulk Transfer and Knoxville City under Norfolk Southern, and West Knoxville under CSX.

That grouping matters if you are selling one of their trucks, or one that used to be. A national producer runs a standard specification, a replacement cycle and a maintenance system that outlives any individual machine.

So equipment leaves on a schedule and at a defined age rather than at the end of its life. The records usually exist and usually add up, and that helps. The caution that goes with it is just as real: a machine that came off a replacement plan was used to that plan, not spared.

Between them Vulcan Materials and Martin Marietta hold all five Knox County pits, so most of the used iron that reaches this market has come off one of two replacement plans rather than out of a dozen unrelated yards.

Neither of those is a problem here. It does mean the hours tell you more than the odometer does, and we would rather hear the hours.

Those three quarries all work crushed stone, which puts them on the wrong side of a line most people never have to look at.

Tenn. Code Ann. § 55-7-203 sets the ordinary numbers: 80,000 lb gross, 20,000 lb on a single axle, 34,000 lb on a tandem, with up to 550 lb more allowed for emissions-reduction equipment.

Then subsection (b)(7) does something unusual. For enforcement it deems weight restrictions to carry a margin of error of ten per cent — for logging, sand, coal, clay, shale, phosphate, solid waste, recovered materials, farm trucks and machinery trucks, off the interstate system only. Crushed stone is not on that list. Neither is limestone, aggregate or gravel. A sand hauler gets the ten per cent and the stone hauler loading beside them gets none.

Kentucky shares a 350-mile border with this state and names crushed stone first on its own commodity list. Same truck, same rock, opposite answer, one state line apart.

A second mechanism sits somewhere nobody would look. Tenn. Code § 47-26-812 is in a weights-and-measures chapter about certified public weighers rather than the motor vehicle chapter, and it shields a natural resources load from an axle-weight citation and adds five hundred pounds. Off the interstate only, again.

Whether any of the definitions in (b)(7) reaches a crushed-stone truck was not established, and we are not going to guess it either way.

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

Beyond the weight rules the paperwork comes down to that one sentence.

Everything after it is a fix rather than a category. A lost title has a counter replacement. Where none exists there is a bonded route. Both are ordinary and neither stops a sale.

One Tennessee rule is unusual enough to state plainly, because the version people repeat is wrong. The salvage and rebuilt part of the code is built on the term passenger motor vehicle, and § 55-3-201 defines that term as a vehicle ten model years old or less — and, where it is a light-duty truck or a multipurpose vehicle, rated at not more than nine thousand pounds gross.

So the seventy-five per cent rule everyone quotes does not reach a truck rated above nine thousand pounds at any age, and does not reach a vehicle of any kind more than ten model years old. Both limbs describe the class the whole part governs; they are not carve-outs inside the threshold.

Whether some other provision reaches such a vehicle was not determined, so nothing here says it does. What we can say is that a page telling you damage past seventy-five per cent brands your truck would be wrong for most of the trucks on this road.

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

So all of that iron is iron we buy. Dump trucks and aggregate haulers off the John Sevier and Riverside Drive pits. Day cabs and road tractors off the Coster and West Knoxville ends of the rail work.

Box trucks, straight trucks, flatbeds, rollbacks, tankers, service bodies, work trucks and pickups as well — not a Knox County thing in particular, those are everywhere.

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 came off a Vulcan or Martin Marietta replacement cycle. Does that count against it?No. Those trucks usually arrive with records, and records help.
• How far out do you come?All of Knox County, out past Heiskell and Mascot. And often we don’t need to come out at all — plenty of these are bought where they stand and towed afterwards.
• How do you pay?Cash or electronic payment, whichever suits you.

Beyond a truck that has simply done its turns, the reasons here are personal ones. Retiring. A medical that went the wrong way. A partnership that ended and left one tractor too many in the yard. A fleet standardising on something newer with one odd unit left over.

Yards around the John Sevier Highway end of Knox County usually have one standing, and so do the small operations out past Mascot that never ran more than three trucks.

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.