Hamilton County
A yard attached to this town that sits inside the next one
One row is attached here: a rail yard recorded with operator CSX Transportation, its coordinate 1.54 miles from the middle of town and joined to it by nearest-centroid fallback. It is the only rail-yard row attached to this town in the node list.
That coordinate lies inside the city limits of Chattanooga, which has a page of its own and six rows of its own besides. So the row is attached to one place and contained by another, and the containment is the stronger of the two facts. This page says so rather than claiming a yard the next city over as local colour.
Two things about how it is recorded. The coordinate is the mean of a track polyline’s vertices rather than a surveyed point — every rail-yard row in this dataset is derived that way. And the 75 miles carried against it is a constant applied across the whole slice and flagged as an estimate, so nothing here leans on it.
What that yard actually handles was not established
Which is the question anybody would ask next, and the honest answer is that the commodities moving through it could not be determined from any source read for this work. No claim is made about them.
So the useful unit here is the county, and Hamilton County is one of the best filled in the state: nineteen rows, behind only Shelby with 25, Davidson with 24 and Cumberland with 20, and level with Marion. Those nineteen are the Volkswagen Chattanooga Assembly Plant and the rail yard that serves it, the Signal Mountain Cement Co under Buzzi Unicem with 123 people, three flour mills, three liquid bulk terminals, a principal port on the river, an Army Reserve centre, two limestone quarries and five more rail yards.
That is a freight county in every mode there is — barge, rail, plant and pit — and this town sits on the edge of it, up the hill.
Up the hill is the part that matters to a truck
Those operations are almost all down in the valley, and this town is not. A truck working out of here is on grade both ways every day, which puts the wear somewhere different from a valley fleet: brakes, retarder and cooling on the way down, driveline and cooling again under sustained torque on the way up.
None of that stops us buying. It is worth mentioning because a mountain truck often reads worse on paper than it deserves — low miles, high hours, brakes replaced more often than a highway truck would need — and that history is a description of the road, not a fault in the machine.
Tell us the hours if the meter reads. On a truck that worked a grade they say more than the odometer does.
Tennessee weight law
One ceiling for every load, and relief that follows the commodity
Whatever a truck around here is carrying, the state’s weight rules are what it runs under.
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 and road tractors doing short drayage off the yards below, box trucks, straight trucks, flatbeds, rollbacks, tankers, service bodies, work trucks and pickups. Tandem dumps and aggregate haulers too, off the Chattanooga Quarry with its 41 people and the Lookout Valley Quarry with 12.
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 Lookout Mountain
- 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 in the surrounding county too?Yes. Hamilton County holds nineteen filed operations, from the Volkswagen Chattanooga Assembly Plant to a river port and the Signal Mountain Cement Co, and we buy across all of it and beyond.
- It has spent its life on the mountain roads.Grade work is hard on brakes and driveline and easy on the odometer, so the miles undersell it. That is a normal history here and it does not stop us buying.
- How do you pay?Cash or electronic payment, whichever suits you.
Why people call
Beyond the roads themselves, 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 down in the valley, from the Lookout Valley Quarry across to the Signal Mountain Cement Co, 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.