We buy trucks in Baytown

Two rail yards attach here and unusually for this stretch of coast both are properly inside the place rather than attached by fallback: one at 2.91 miles from the centre and one at 3.56 miles, both under Union Pacific.

One of the two carries a corporate name in its node name. Whether that company still owns or operates the facility was not established by the research, and nothing is asserted about it here — a name in a dataset records who it was named for, not who holds it today.

What the commodities are at either yard could not be determined from any source read, so this page does not say.

Those two plant yards describe the industry without either of them naming a commodity.

A yard on plant ground handles what the plant makes, and along this part of Harris County that means liquids and pellets rather than boxes. The trucking is short legs between units, docks and tank farms, with a gate queue at each end.

It is a pattern that fills the hour meter and leaves the odometer alone, which is the single most misleading thing about a truck sold anywhere near this channel. Union Pacific holds both rows, 2.91 miles out and 3.56, across Harris County.

All of that plant traffic runs under one statutory ceiling, whatever it is carrying.

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 petrochemical work, liquid and pneumatic. Vacuum trucks and service bodies off maintenance and turnarounds. Day cabs and road tractors off the Union Pacific rows at 2.91 and 3.56 miles, flatbeds, dump trucks, rollbacks, box trucks, straight trucks, and the work trucks and pickups that go with a crew.

Harris County plant fleets turn over on maintenance schedules rather than market ones, so equipment tends to come free in a planned way.

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 chemicals.Not a problem in itself. Tell us what it carried and whether it has been cleaned, and we will take it from there.
• The hours are high and the miles are low.That is the normal shape of a Harris County plant truck working two yards inside 3.56 miles. 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 standing down, the reasons are personal ones. Retiring. A medical that went the wrong way. A back that has had enough of the channel road.

Yards around the Union Pacific rows and out across Harris 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.