We buy trucks in Brady

Two operations sit here and they work different rock. MAG Materials runs five employees on dimension granite. Permian Frac Sand runs twenty-four on industrial sand, and its name states its market rather than its location.

That distance is the interesting part. Brady is 238 miles from Kermit, and a Kermit mine sits twenty to sixty miles from a Permian well pad. So sand loaded here and sent to a Permian completion is a long-haul movement of exactly the kind the industry spent a decade trying to design out by mining in-basin.

The rail is a single yard, 1.82 miles out, and its operator is neither of the big two: the Central Texas and Colorado River Railway, a shortline. It attaches to Brady by nearest-centroid fallback rather than by a source naming the town, which is a weaker match and worth saying so.

Those 238 miles are the defining fact for equipment in this county. A truck working that lane is a highway truck that happens to serve a mine, not a pit truck.

It changes what wears. Long legs put miles on rather than hours, so the odometer here means more than it does in a queueing town like Houston. What stays the same is the wellsite waiting at the far end.

A pneumatic tank that carried proppant has had a harder life than one that carried cement, because sand is selected for hardness and crush resistance. You know better than we do what 238 miles of that does over a few years. MAG Materials on granite and Permian Frac Sand on proppant are 238 miles from the wells they serve.

Those long runs sit under one statutory ceiling, and neither sand nor granite is on the relief list.

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 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.

All of that equipment is equipment we buy. Pneumatic tankers and belly dumps off the sand lane. Flatbeds off the granite. Day cabs and road tractors for the long legs, dump trucks, rollbacks, box trucks, straight trucks, service bodies, and the work trucks and pickups that go with a crew.

Because this is a long way from anywhere, coming to you is usually the sensible answer, and it is the one we expect to be using. Driving it to us stays on the table if you happen to be heading our way, and some people are.

Whatever you drive, the offer doesn’t change. We buy all of them. The Colorado River Railway shortline at 1.82 miles is the only rail here.

• 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.
• Do you really come out this far?Yes, and out here that is usually how it goes. We come to you and drive it away, or we come to you and tow it. We can also buy it remotely and arrange the tow, with no visit at all. You are welcome to drive it to us instead if that suits you better.
• My tanker hauled frac sand.Then it has worked harder than a cement tank, and we would like to know the history. It does not change whether we buy 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 McCulloch County and the ones around it. Distance has never stopped a sale. Permian Frac Sand works proppant 238 miles from the wells it serves, and the granite side works stone. We buy off both.

Beyond a sand lane going quiet, the reasons are personal ones. Retiring. A medical that went the wrong way. A truck that stopped earning when the completions moved and has been sitting since.

Yards around the Central Texas and Colorado River line 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 McCulloch County the same tankers come up for sale for the same reasons. The Colorado River Railway shortline is the only rail here, and the wells it serves are 238 miles west.