We buy trucks in Rossville

The rail yard attached to this town is filed as Memphis Regional Intermodal, runs under Norfolk Southern, and its coordinate lies 2.36 miles from the town centroid — attached by nearest-centroid fallback rather than by falling inside the place.

The name points at a city about fifty miles off. That is a different thing from a plain misfiling: the word REGIONAL is doing the work, because the facility is named for the region it serves rather than for the ground it stands on. Marketing, not error.

Its counterpart completes the swap. A second row, ROSSVILLE INTMDL, is filed under Piperton and sits physically inside this town. So the row named for this town is filed elsewhere, and the row filed here is named for Memphis. A third row in the county, a rail intermodal ramp, is recorded as Memphis, TN — Rossville, which splits the difference by naming both.

It means a facility name is not a location, and nobody should be penalised for repeating the name that was on their paperwork. The row sits 2.36 miles from the middle of this town under a name pointing fifty miles west. If your gate pass says one town and your yard talk says another, both can be right about this place.

What we ask instead is which gate the machine actually ran out of. That is a question about the truck rather than about the record, and it is the one that has an answer.

The traffic itself is drayage: short cycles between ramp and warehouse, loaded one way, heavy on coupling and shunting. Hours accumulate far faster than miles on that work, so a modest odometer on a Fayette County day cab is normal rather than remarkable.

Beyond the naming, it says less than you would expect. The commodities handled at the yard could not be determined from any source read for the research batch, and we are not going to guess at them.

The coordinate carries a caveat too. It is recorded as the mean of a track polyline’s vertices rather than a surveyed facility point, and all 2,459 rail-yard rows in this dataset share that derivation. The radius attached to the row is a slice-wide constant flagged as estimated rather than a measured catchment.

So the 2.36 miles is a distance between two approximations, and the honest reading of it is that the Norfolk Southern yard is near this town rather than precisely that far from its middle.

Those gaps do not reach the law, which does not vary by how well a row was researched.

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.

§ 55-7-103 lets the department set a lower maximum between 15 January and 15 April, and at any other time for repairs, weather or recent construction, with a week’s notice posted at the termini of the road and at every detour.

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. §§ 55-7-103, 55-7-104 and 55-7-203, as summarised by the University of Tennessee County Technical Assistance Service. Information, not legal advice.

Beyond the weight rules, the paperwork is one sentence.

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. Day cabs, yard tractors and chassis tractors off drayage into the Memphis Regional Intermodal ground, and the flatbeds and tippers that serve everything else in Fayette County.

Road tractors, box trucks, straight trucks, rollbacks, tankers, service bodies, work trucks and pickups too — not a Fayette 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.
• My paperwork names a different town than the yard does.Expected around here. The rows for the Memphis Regional Intermodal ground disagree with the map in both directions. Just tell us where the gate was.
• Low miles for its age.Ordinary on drayage work in Fayette County, where the cycle is short and the loaded leg is one way. We read hours, clutch and air system rather than the odometer on that history.
• How do you pay?Cash or electronic payment, whichever suits you.

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

The yards around the Memphis Regional Intermodal ground and out across Fayette County 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. We can come and drive it away, come and tow it, or buy it where it stands and arrange the tow with no visit at all.