We buy trucks in Alvord

A single row attaches to this town: an industrial sand operation reporting 4 employees, operator of record Image Construction Inc, trading as Image Mtls. It is carried as a surface operation working industrial sand.

Wise County sits in or beside the Barnett Shale, which spans roughly five thousand square miles across twenty-five counties centred under the Dallas–Fort Worth metroplex, and where fracking was first used together with horizontal drilling.

And that is as far as the evidence goes. The operator names in this group say frac sand; whether this sand serves the Barnett, ships west to the Permian, or feeds construction markets around the metroplex was not established for any of them.

North Texas is within trucking distance of all three, which is exactly why the question cannot be settled by looking at a map.

That absence is the honest centre of this page, and it is worth being blunt about.

On the Permian and Eagle Ford pages the wellsite duty cycle is established, and those pages say so: lease roads, wait time that is engine time, last-mile work into a wellsite. Writing the same paragraph here would be an assumption dressed as a fact, and a seller reading it would be told something about their own truck that nobody actually knows.

What is established is the geography. Dallas–Fort Worth is 60 to 80 miles from most of this group, so these are genuine highway distances rather than metro-fringe runs, whichever of the three destinations a given load was going to.

So the questions we ask here are ordinary ones and we ask them rather than guessing: where did it run, how much of that was highway, and what was actually behind it. A four-person operation in Wise County can be feeding any of three markets, and the truck knows which even when the record does not.

Whichever of those markets a load was going to, it ran to the same statutory ceiling.

Texas sets gross weight at 80,000 lb, a single axle at 20,000 lb and a tandem at 34,000 lb — the plain federal figures, with no commodity variance of the kind Georgia and Kentucky grant.

Texas grants permits instead, each written for a named industry: ready-mixed concrete, fluid milk, timber, and super heavy single-trip. There is no permit named for aggregate, stone, sand or quarry products, so a sand hauler falls back to the general route and nothing else.

That general permit adds ten per cent on the axle and five per cent on gross, with registration to 80,000 lb, a fifteen thousand dollar bond, and liability for actual damage to load-restricted roads and bridges. On a load-zoned road the permitted weight is ten per cent less than the maximum, so those two percentages run against each other and must not be added.

Tex. Transp. Code § 621.101; Chapter 623 permits. Information, not legal advice.

Beyond the weight rules, the paperwork comes down to 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. Both are ordinary and neither stops a sale.

The Texas salvage line is the most seller-favourable on file. A truck is branded salvage only where the cost of repairs exceeds its actual cash value immediately before the damage — effectively the whole value, with no percentage in the test at all. It is a two-part test as well: there must be damage to, or a missing, major component part, and thirteen of those are enumerated.

Repainting and sales tax come out of the repair figure before the comparison, which no other state on file does. On a heavy truck paint is a large repair line.

Emissions inspection is not a step for a diesel truck in Texas. The state exempts diesel vehicles outright, so the county programme list never reaches it.

Tex. Transp. Code § 501.091; TCEQ vehicle emissions programme. Information, not legal advice, and only as current as the date the rule file was last verified.

All of that iron is iron we buy. Belly dumps and flatbeds off the Image Construction ground, day cabs and road tractors for the run down toward the metroplex, dump trucks and pneumatic tankers.

Then the rest of it: lowboys, rollbacks, box trucks, straight trucks, service bodies, and the work trucks and pickups that go with a crew.

A four-person operation in Wise County sells one truck at a time, and 80 miles of highway to the metroplex means those trucks are genuine road units rather than yard machines.

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.
• It hauled sand, so it must be a wellsite truck.We will not assume that. Around Wise County and the Barnett Shale the destination is not established either way, and your truck is the only record of where it actually went.
• High highway miles rather than lease-road hours.Very possible here, given 80 miles to the metroplex. Give us the odometer and the hours and we read them together rather than assuming which one matters.
• What about the title?We need one unless the truck is old enough that it never had one. Lost titles have a counter replacement; where none exists there’s a bonded route.
• Do you have to come out to look at it?Not necessarily. We can come to you and drive it away, come and tow it, buy it remotely and arrange the tow, or you can drive it to us. Whichever suits the truck and your week.

Beyond a hauling contract ending, the reasons are personal ones. Retiring. A medical that went the wrong way. A truck bought for one job that outlived it.

Yards around the Image Construction ground and across Wise County usually have one waiting.

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.