We buy trucks in Bellmead

Two rows attach to this town and they are two different kinds of freight. One is a rail yard, recorded with Union Pacific as operator, 0.86 miles from the town centroid and comfortably inside the place.

The other is a liquid bulk terminal, attached by nearest centroid at 3.2 miles, carrying no operator and no commodity in the record at all.

Their coordinates sit 2.57 miles apart. So this is a small town with a rail yard and a liquid terminal within a couple of miles of each other, which is more freight infrastructure than the size of the place would suggest.

What either of them actually handles was not determined. The rail yard’s traffic could not be established from any source read, and the terminal row is blank where a commodity would go.

Those two blanks are better left alone than filled in.

The rail-yard coordinate is the mean of a track polyline’s vertices rather than a surveyed point, and every rail row in this dataset is derived that way. The 75 miles of working radius attached to it is a constant applied across the whole set and flagged as estimated.

What is measurable is the neighbourhood. The Waco Plant, run by Lehigh White Cement Company with seventy-two people, sits 11.37 miles from the rail yard, and McLennan County carries a good deal more besides — sand and gravel plants around Waco and at Riesel, and a limestone mill at Crawford with forty-three people.

Two terminals two and a half miles apart and a cement plant eleven miles down the road is a short-haul pattern. Drayage between gates, tank work in and out of the terminal, and aggregate moves toward the plant.

Whichever gate a truck runs out of, it loads under one 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.

What Texas grants instead is permits, and each is written for a named industry: ready-mixed concrete, fluid milk, timber, and super heavy single-trip. Ready-mixed concrete is on that list; aggregate and stone are not, so two trades a reader might treat as one sit on opposite sides of the line.

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 runs further in the seller’s favour than any other state 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. It is a two-part test as well: there must be damage to, or a missing, major component part, and the statute enumerates thirteen.

Repainting and sales tax come out of the repair figure first, which no other state on file does. On an older truck with cosmetic damage that is the difference between a brand and no brand.

Emissions inspection is not a step for a diesel truck in Texas. The state exempts diesel vehicles outright.

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 is iron we buy. Day cabs and road tractors for the drayage, bulk tankers for the liquid terminal work, dump trucks and aggregate haulers for the cement traffic, flatbeds for whatever will not tip or pour.

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

Short runs are hard on a truck in a way long runs are not, and 2.57 miles between two gates is about as short as it gets. The Waco Plant is 11.37 miles further on, and aggregate moving that way is ordinary work here.

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 only ever did short runs. Is that a problem?No, and it is the normal pattern here — the Union Pacific yard is 0.86 miles from the middle of town. Tell us the hours as well as the miles; on drayage the two numbers rarely agree.
• What does the liquid terminal here handle?The record does not say — the row carries no commodity at all, and it sits 3.2 miles out. We will not invent it. If you hauled out of it, you know what it was.
• 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 buy it remotely and arrange the tow, come to you and drive it away, come and tow it, or you can drive it to us. Whichever suits the truck and your week.

Beyond a 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 between the Union Pacific yard and the liquid terminal 2.57 miles from it, and out across McLennan 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.