Tarrant County
One plant, and it has been here seventy years
Arlington Assembly covers two hundred and fifty acres with five and three-quarter million square feet of floor space, and employed five thousand six hundred and forty-one people as of 2022. It builds full-size sport utility vehicles — the Chevrolet Tahoe and Suburban, the GMC Yukon and the Cadillac Escalade.
It opened in 1954, marked its seventieth year in 2024, and built its thirteen millionth vehicle in the same year. Current employment, current daily output and the plant’s electrification plans were not established by the research, so this page does not state them.
The rail side is one row: the Garrett yard, operator Union Pacific, 4.88 miles from the centre of town, and the only rail-yard row attached to Arlington.
So the truck traffic here is inbound parts and outbound finished vehicles
A plant of that size does not run on one kind of truck. Those two flows are different jobs: parts arriving on a schedule tight enough that a late trailer stops a line, and finished vehicles leaving on car haulers.
Both are hard on equipment in undramatic ways. Constant docking, a great deal of low-speed manoeuvring, and trailers that spend their lives being coupled and uncoupled rather than running.
None of it stops us buying. It does mean a plant-fleet truck is often in better mechanical shape than its hours suggest, and worse cosmetic shape than its miles do. The Garrett yard under Union Pacific sits 4.88 miles out and it is the only rail row here.
Texas weight law
One ceiling, and a permit list that skips stone
Those inbound loads run under one statutory ceiling, and Texas raises the axle limits rather than the gross.
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 is a single 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 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 Arlington Assembly outbound. Day cabs and road tractors off the inbound parts runs. Box trucks and straight trucks, flatbeds, rollbacks, dump trucks, service bodies, and the work trucks and pickups that go with a crew.
Most of it works between the plant and the Garrett yard, or out along the corridors either side of town.
Whatever you drive, the offer doesn’t change. We buy all of them. Chevrolet Tahoe and Cadillac Escalade bodies are what the outbound haulers carry.
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 Arlington
- 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 came out of a plant fleet. Is that a problem?Not at all. Plant trucks are usually well maintained and we are glad to see them.
- My car hauler has damaged decking.Tell us about it. Decking is a repair, not a disqualifier, and it does not make a truck incomplete.
- 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 Tarrant County and across the Metroplex. Distance has never stopped a sale.
Why people call
Beyond a plant contract that ended, the reasons are personal ones. Retiring. A medical that went the wrong way. An owner-operator who ran parts for years and has had enough of the schedule.
Yards around the Garrett line and out across Tarrant 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. Across Tarrant County the same haulers come up for sale for the same reasons.