Brown County
The largest registered disturbance in the state sample
The Brownwood Quarry runs 29 employees, and the registration it sits on covers 750 acres — the largest registered disturbance of the 186 Texas rows checked against the state aggregate register.
It is rated for highway work. The state highway department carries Vulcan Materials Brownwood in its rated-source catalogue with a surface aggregate classification and an abrasion figure behind it, which is what decides whether a rock goes under a road or into a driveway.
A second row shares that same registration: a portable crusher with 3 employees, sitting 0.42 miles from the registered site under the same operator. So it is a travelling plant working on somebody else’s permitted ground rather than a separate quarry.
So two very different trucking patterns share one gate
Those two rows on one registration mean the same 750 acres feeds both a fixed quarry and a plant that moves.
The fixed side runs short loaded trips all day from the same scale house, which wears brakes, springs and rear ends rather than engines. The portable side runs lowboys and tractors that move plant between jobs, and those put real highway miles on.
It matters when you sell one, because the odometer means opposite things on the two. A Vulcan Materials pit truck can be mechanically sound with a hard-used body, and a plant mover is usually the reverse.
Texas weight law
One ceiling, and a permit list that skips stone
Both patterns run under one statutory ceiling, and stone is not 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.
Texas paperwork
We need a title — unless it never had one
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.
What we buy here
All of that iron is iron we buy. Dump trucks and aggregate haulers off the Brownwood Quarry. Lowboys and the tractors that move the portable plant its 0.42 miles and further. Day cabs, flatbeds, rollbacks, box trucks, straight trucks, service bodies, and the work trucks and pickups that go with a crew.
The rail here is one row, 0.54 miles from the centre of town, and the National Guard ground at Camp Bowie adds its own contractor traffic on top.
Whatever you drive, the offer doesn’t change. We buy all of them.
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 Brownwood
- 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.
- The box is beaten up but the driveline is good.That is the normal shape of a Brown County pit truck and it is not a problem. Tell us about both.
- It followed the portable plant around.Then it has highway miles as well as pit hours. Vulcan Materials ground and the 750 acres around it produce both kinds.
- 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.
Why people call
Beyond a quarry contract ending, the reasons are personal ones. Retiring. A medical that went the wrong way. A truck bought for one job that outlived the job.
Yards around the Brownwood Quarry and out toward Camp Bowie usually have one waiting, and the 0.54 miles of rail in town sees its share.
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.