Shelby County
Twelve yards, and five different railroads working them
Plenty of cities have a rail yard. Memphis has twelve of them on our list, and the thing that separates it is not the count but the ownership. Norfolk Southern holds Forrest. Canadian National holds Harrison, Hollywood, Sevier and the Memphis Intermodal Terminal. CSX holds Sargent and two of the Leewood rows. Union Pacific holds the third. BNSF Railway holds Yale, Tennessee and Memphis Intermodal.
Five carriers, one city. That is not a normal distribution and it changes who a truck around here works for.
The river side is separate again. A petroleum port is filed here, and the Valero refinery at Memphis sits in the same dataset under its operator’s name rather than its own — which is how it went unnoticed in an earlier sweep, and is a fair warning about reading a facility list by name.
Leewood is one place and three rows, and that tells you something
Those three Leewood rows are the clearest example. One carries no tag at all, one is tagged CSXT and one is tagged UP, and each tag matches its own carrier field: two rows under CSX Transportation and one under Union Pacific, within about half a mile of each other.
That is a base facility plus one row per railroad using it. The pattern says a Memphis ramp is not a single railroad’s private yard the way a branch-line yard is. More than one carrier works the same ground, which means the haulier pulling off it can be working for either of them in the same week.
The naming runs the same way, and it is easy to misread. Memphis Intermodal is BNSF. Memphis Intermodal Terminal is Canadian National and sits 11.50 miles out, the longest such attachment anywhere in this state. Memphis Regional Intermodal is Norfolk Southern and is filed under Rossville, not here. Three similar names, three carriers, three different places.
What none of these rows tell us is what actually moves through them. The commodities at every one of the twelve could not be established from anything we read, and we are not going to invent them.
Ramp work, and what it does to a tractor
So the shape of the day is short. Pull a box or a trailer off a Leewood or Sargent ramp, run it to a warehouse, come back, do it again — and the furthest of these yards, the Canadian National terminal, is 11.50 miles from the middle of Shelby County, which is a short leg by any measure. Constant coupling, low-speed manoeuvring in tight yards, and a great deal of queue idling the odometer never sees.
A ramp tractor can be worn out at a mileage a highway truck would still call broken in, and the wear is in the clutch, the fifth wheel, the suspension and the hours rather than in the top end. None of that stops us buying one. It does mean we would rather hear the hours than the miles.
Tank work off the river end is a different life again — heavier, slower, with the wear in the running gear — and it is the reason the mix on this page is wider than a one-industry town’s would be.
Tennessee weight law
The rule that costs you a day, not a fine
Both of those trades run under the same statutory ceiling as everything else in the state.
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 allowed for emissions-reduction equipment. Subsection (b)(7) adds a ten per cent margin of error on the weighing for eleven named classes — logging, sand, coal, clay, shale, phosphate, solid waste, recovered materials, farm trucks and machinery trucks — and only off the interstate system. A box off a ramp is on none of those lists.
The provision that actually bites is § 55-7-104 with what follows it. An overweight vehicle in Tennessee is not fined and sent on its way. It is illegal to move it until the load has been reduced into compliance or a permit obtained, and failing to comply is itself a Class C misdemeanour carrying up to thirty days.
In a city built on turning loads, the stop is the expensive part. The penalty is not what it costs you.
Tenn. Code Ann. § 55-7-203, § 55-7-104 and § 40-35-111, 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
Then there is the paperwork, and it starts and mostly ends with that sentence.
Everything past it is a fix. A lost title has a counter replacement. Where none exists there is a bonded route. Neither is unusual and neither stops a sale.
Tennessee’s salvage rule is one to get right, because the short version people repeat is wrong. The whole salvage and rebuilt part rests 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 test 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 are the boundaries of the class the part governs rather than exceptions within it. Whether anything else in Tennessee law reaches such a vehicle was not determined and is not asserted 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
All of that iron is iron we buy. Day cabs and road tractors off the Leewood, Sargent and Yale ends, and off the Canadian National and Norfolk Southern ramps too. Tankers and tank tractors off the river and the terminal side.
And the ones that are not a Shelby County thing in particular, because they work everywhere: box trucks and straight trucks, flatbeds, dump trucks, rollbacks, sleepers, service bodies, work trucks and pickups.
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 Memphis
- 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 is a ramp tractor with high hours on a low odometer. Still interested?Yes. Around Shelby County that is the ordinary shape of a working truck, not a warning sign.
- Do you buy tank equipment?Yes. Tell us what it last carried and whether it has been cleaned, because that changes how it moves rather than whether we want it.
- How do you pay?Cash or electronic payment, whichever suits you.
Why people call
Beyond a tractor that has simply done its turns, the reasons are personal ones. Retiring. A DOT physical that did not go the way it used to. A contract that ended and left one unit too many on the yard.
And the slow one: the truck is just sitting, and every month it sits is another month of insurance on something that is not turning a wheel.
The yards out around Leewood and the Shelby County warehouse belt see a steady turnover of the same tractors for the same reasons, and so do the Canadian National and Norfolk Southern ends of it.
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.