Sell your semi truck for cash in La Follette the easy and convenient way

Two rows carry this town. Potter South East works a crushed limestone facility with five people on it, 1.32 miles from the middle of town. The other is the Mountainside coal preparation plant, 7.54 miles out, with no headcount recorded against it.

A coal preparation plant and a stone pit are not the same trade and they do not run the same trucks, and it is worth saying that the two rows sit under one town name rather than describing a single local industry. What they have in common is the corridor they both feed.

The stone facility is not asserted to be on the state’s approved producer list. There is a register entry within about two miles, but its company name disagrees with the operator our list holds, so it may well describe a neighbouring operation. Proximity alone attaches the wrong producer where two pits sit close together, which in this trade they often do, so no approval is claimed here.

That pit has a restriction essentially at its gate. Within ten miles the inventory records 96 structures and 8 are posted, only 3 of them county-maintained — and the nearest is 0.2 miles out.

The lowest raw rating in the set is 7.5 metric tonnes, about 8.3 US tons, below an empty tandem dump and so not a crossing this trade uses at all. Six of the eight clear the eleven-tonne floor, and the lowest of those, 17.5 tonnes or about 19.3 US tons, is the cap that binds a loaded vehicle — about 6.5 tonnes of stone over tare.

Campbell County as a whole posts 6 of its 74 county-maintained bridges, 8.1 per cent against a statewide county-maintained rate of 12.9. So the county is not heavily restricted. The awkwardness is where the one crossing sits.

FHWA National Bridge Inventory 2025, Tennessee file, items 21, 41, 64 and 70. Operating rating is the gross weight of the rating vehicle. Tennessee codes item 41 more broadly than neighbouring states, so the true count of load restrictions is lower than the posted count suggests.

Both of those numbers matter less than the ground they sit on. Campbell County lies where Interstate 75 climbs the Cumberland Mountain to Jellico Gap and crosses into Kentucky, and with only 74 county-maintained bridges the network is thin rather than restricted — one spine, few alternatives.

So the load rations itself at about 6.5 tonnes over tare on the awkward crossing, and everything else is grade. North into Kentucky or south towards Knoxville, a loaded truck out of here climbed and descended for a living.

Which puts brakes, cooling and driveline ahead of the odometer on any machine from this town, whether it came off the Potter South East pit 1.32 miles out or off the Mountainside plant. That is the one thing the two rows here really do share.

Over that grade and that crossing alike, the weight statute is unchanged.

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.

Tenn. Code § 47-26-812 adds an axle-citation shield and five hundred pounds for a natural resources load, from a weights-and-measures chapter about certified public weighers rather than the motor vehicle code. Off the interstate again.

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.

Past the weight rules 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.

All of that iron is iron we buy. Tandem dumps and aggregate haulers off the Potter South East facility, and whatever ran to and from the Mountainside plant.

Day cabs, road tractors, box trucks, straight trucks, flatbeds, rollbacks, tankers, service bodies, work trucks and pickups too — not a Campbell County thing in particular, they run 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 hauled coal, not stone.Both are ours. There is a coal preparation plant filed under this town as well as a stone pit, and we buy the trucks off either.
• Low miles, heavy wear.Common here. With a posted crossing 0.2 miles from the gate and the Cumberland Mountain grade beyond it, the work came in short heavy trips rather than distance.
• How do you pay?Cash or electronic payment, whichever suits you.

Beyond a machine that has simply done its work, the reasons here are ordinary ones. Retiring. A medical that went the wrong way. A contract finishing and the plant that served it having nowhere to go next.

The yards around Campbell County, from the Potter South East pit out towards the Mountainside plant, 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.