Hays County
A cement plant, and two quarries rated for the highway
The largest operation here is an integrated cement plant and quarry recording 145 employees, run as a partnership under one of the big international building-materials groups.
Two crushed-stone rows sit with it and both are rated for road work. The state highway department carries Centex Materials in its rated-source catalogue for one and Alleyton Resource Corp for the Hays Quarry, each with a surface aggregate classification behind it.
They are different sizes of business: 25 employees at one and 6 at the other, feeding the same corridor.
So two different trucks leave the same few miles of road
That combination of plant and pit puts two trades on the same route, and only one of them gets any weight relief.
Bulk cement leaves the plant in pneumatic tankers. Ready-mixed concrete leaves in mixers. The state ready-mixed concrete permit covers the mixer delivering the mix and not the bulk tanker leaving the gate, so two trucks on the same road are under different rules because of what is in the back.
The aggregate side gets nothing at all: no Texas permit is named for stone, so a Hays Quarry hauler runs on the general permit like everybody else, and so does anything off the Centex Materials ground.
Texas weight law
One ceiling, and a permit list that skips stone
Beyond that one allowance, everything here runs under the ordinary 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 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. Mixers and pneumatic tankers off the cement side. Dump trucks and aggregate haulers off the Centex Materials and Alleyton Resource Corp pits. Day cabs and road tractors, flatbeds, rollbacks, box trucks, straight trucks, service bodies, and the work trucks and pickups that go with a crew.
A 145-employee plant working alongside a 25-employee quarry turns over a steady supply of equipment through Hays County.
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 Buda
- 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 drum is worn out on my mixer.A worn drum is not a missing component and does not make a truck incomplete. Tell us about it.
- Is a mixer treated differently from a stone hauler?On the road it is: ready-mixed concrete gets an axle allowance and a Hays Quarry or Centex Materials hauler does not. To us they are both trucks we buy.
- 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 pour schedule ending, the reasons are personal ones. Retiring. A medical that went the wrong way. A truck bought for a job that finished.
Yards around the Centex Materials pit and across Hays 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.