Randall County
Two caliche pits, and one of them is named for another town
Two crushed-stone rows attach here. The DC Caliche operation records 5 employees and the second records 2.
The second one carries three different places at once, and it is worth untangling rather than glossing. It is named for Amarillo, its coordinate sits in Potter County, and it attaches to this town — the Randall County seat, about twenty miles south of the city it is named after.
None of those three is wrong exactly. A pit can be named for the market it serves, sit in one county and be nearest to a town in another, and the research recorded all three rather than picking one.
So what is being dug here is caliche, not rock
Both those operations work the same material, and the Panhandle has no outcropping hard rock to speak of.
Caliche is an immature limestone lying under a thin cover of soil, and it comes up as base material rather than as aggregate for concrete. It goes onto roads, pads and yards rather than into a batch plant.
That makes for short off-highway hauls over rough ground: hard on suspensions and tyres, easy on the odometer, and a truck can be genuinely used up here at a mileage that looks like very little. Randall County and Potter County ground both run that way.
Texas weight law
One ceiling, and a permit list that skips stone
On the highway stretches it all runs 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 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 base haulers off the DC Caliche ground and the Potter County pit. Day cabs and road tractors for the run up to the city, flatbeds, lowboys, rollbacks, box trucks, straight trucks, service bodies, and the work trucks and pickups that go with a crew.
Randall County work is steady rather than seasonal, so equipment tends to come free on a schedule.
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 Canyon
- 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 spent its life on pads and lease roads.That is the normal shape of a DC Caliche truck. Low miles and a hard life — tell us the hours.
- The suspension has taken a beating.Expected off Randall County caliche work and not a disqualifier. Potter County pits are the same. Tell us what has been replaced.
- 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 job finishing, the reasons are personal ones. Retiring. A medical that went the wrong way. A truck bought for one contract that outlived it.
Yards across Randall County and up toward the Potter County end usually have one waiting, about twenty miles north.
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.