Potter County
Three yards, one carrier, and one that handles cars
Three rail yards attach to this city and all three run under the same railroad, which is unusual — most towns this size split between two.
They sit close in. One is 0.23 miles from the centre, the main yard 1.33 miles, and the Auto Ramp 3.05 miles out. Two of the three share the town’s name, one with a directional prefix and one with a function descriptor.
That third one is a different business from the other two. An automobile ramp loads and unloads finished vehicles rather than freight, and it is part of a small family of such rows recorded across the country.
So there is car-haul work here that the aggregate side never sees
That Auto Ramp puts a truck on these roads which most Panhandle towns do not have.
Car haulers are their own trade. The deck and the hydraulics take the wear rather than the frame, the loads are light for their bulk, and the damage that matters is cosmetic in a way it never is on a dump truck.
Alongside it runs the ordinary stone work: a small crusher operation with 4 employees, sitting 9.3 miles from the nearest active registration, which out here is unremarkable rather than suspicious.
Texas weight law
One ceiling, and a permit list that skips stone
All of it runs under one statutory ceiling, cars and stone alike.
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.
What Texas grants instead is permits, and each one is 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 stone hauler here gets the general permit and nothing else, while a ready-mix truck sits on the list — two trades a reader might treat as one, on opposite sides of the line.
The general permit adds ten per cent on the axle and five per cent on gross, and it comes with a bond and liability for actual damage to load-restricted roads. On a load-zoned road the permitted weight is ten per cent less than the maximum, so those two percentages run in opposite directions and must never be added together.
Tex. Transp. Code § 621.101; Chapter 623 permits. Information, not legal advice.
Texas paperwork
We need a title — unless it never had one
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.
One Texas rule is worth knowing because it runs further than any other state on file. Texas brands a truck salvage only where the cost of repairs exceeds the actual cash value before the damage — effectively one hundred per cent, against eighty in Florida and sixty in Oklahoma. And it is a two-part test, not pure arithmetic: there must also be damage to, or a missing, major component part.
The statute lists thirteen major component parts, and the calculation leaves out repainting and sales tax, which no other state on file excludes. For a truck whose damage is mostly cosmetic that moves the answer a long way.
Tex. Transp. Code § 501.091. Information, not legal advice, and only as current as the date the rule file was last verified.
What we buy here
All of that iron is iron we buy. Car haulers off the Auto Ramp traffic. Day cabs and road tractors for the long Panhandle legs. Dump trucks and aggregate haulers, flatbeds, rollbacks, box trucks, straight trucks, service bodies, and the work trucks and pickups that go with a crew.
Three yards inside 3.05 miles and a crusher 9.3 miles from its nearest registration is the whole local picture, and it turns over a steady supply.
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 Amarillo
- 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.
- My car hauler has damaged decking.Decking is a repair, not a disqualifier, and it does not make a truck incomplete. Auto Ramp work chews it up eventually.
- It has been parked out on the plains a while.Common in Potter County and not a disqualifier. Tell us how long and whether anything came off it.
- 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.
- How far out do you come?All of Potter and Randall counties and across the Panhandle. Plenty out that way we buy remotely and arrange the tow.
Why people call
Beyond a haul contract ending, the reasons are personal ones. Retiring. A medical that went the wrong way. A truck left when somebody stopped driving it.
Yards around the Auto Ramp and out across Potter County usually have one waiting, and the 0.23 miles of yard in the middle of town sees its share.
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.