We buy trucks in Bayou Vista

The refining complex up the road at Texas City is stated by its operator at 631,000 barrels of crude a day, and is reported as the second largest refinery in the United States on federal energy figures.

It is not in this town, and the records say so plainly. The port row resolves here at 3.36 miles by nearest-centroid while Texas City holds a city page of its own, and the single rail yard filed here — run by the City Terminal Railway at 2.34 miles — has a coordinate inside Texas City too.

So this is a small bayside community sitting beside somebody else’s industry, and the honest version of the local record is that it belongs up the road.

That refining capacity is what generates the road work for miles around, and 631,000 barrels a day is a great deal of movement.

It is plant and terminal work rather than long haul: tankers running product a few miles at a time, vacuum and maintenance trucks on turnarounds, and gate queues at both ends of every leg.

The queues are the part that catches people out when they sell. Hours pile onto an engine that the odometer barely moves, so the mileage on a Galveston County tanker understates what it has done. The City Terminal Railway yard 2.34 miles out sees the same traffic.

All of that terminal traffic runs under one statutory ceiling, whatever is in the tank.

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.

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.

All of that iron is iron we buy. Tankers off the refinery and terminal work. Vacuum trucks and service bodies off maintenance. Day cabs and road tractors off the City Terminal Railway traffic, flatbeds, dump trucks, rollbacks, box trucks, straight trucks, and the work trucks and pickups that go with a crew.

Because the working yards are 2.34 and 3.36 miles off in the next town, a truck here is often stored rather than based, which suits buying it remotely and arranging the tow.

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 refinery product.Ordinary in Galveston County. Tell us what it carried and whether the tank has been cleaned, and we will take it from there.
• The hours are high and the miles are low.Normal on terminal runs of 3.36 miles with a queue at each end. Not a problem — tell us the hours.
• 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 turnaround finishing, the reasons are personal ones. Retiring. A medical that went the wrong way. A back that has had enough of the gate queue.

Places across Galveston County and around the City Terminal Railway yard 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.