We buy trucks in Castroville

The extraction node attached to Castroville is the Medina Quarry, operated by Vulcan Construction Materials, with twelve people on MSHA’s books. It resolves here by nearest centroid at 11.46 miles.

That distance is unusual enough to lead with. It is the longest city-attachment distance in the research batch this node came from, and the third longest among the eighty nodes researched to that point. Both of those are statements about the eighty nodes examined, not about Texas, and they should be read that way.

What it means in practice is that the quarry is a Medina County neighbour rather than a Castroville employer. A truck working it is on the road before it starts work, which is a different daily pattern from a yard on the edge of town.

That quarry has a published rating, and it points somewhere specific. TxDOT’s Bituminous Rated Source Quality Catalog, the September 2022 edition, carries Vulcan Materials Medina Quarry as producer code 1516320, limestone, at Surface Aggregate Classification B, with a rated Los Angeles abrasion of 31 and a rated magnesium sulfate soundness of 29.

The soundness figure is the one to notice. Magnesium sulfate soundness is a weathering test and the number is a loss, so higher means more material lost. At 29 this is the highest rated soundness loss of any source examined in that batch — again a statement about the batch, which is the only scope the research supports.

None of that is a verdict on the quarry, and it is not a claim about the trucks either. It is context for what the loads are: dense limestone that reaches legal gross well before the body is visually full, so a Medina County dump weighs out rather than cubes out, and the wear shows in the hoist and the tailgate before it shows in the mileage.

Those weighed-out loads run under a single ceiling, and limestone gets no relief written for it.

Texas legal limits without a permit are 80,000 lb gross, 20,000 lb on a single axle and 34,000 lb on a tandem — the plain federal figures, with no commodity variance of the kind Georgia and Kentucky grant.

Weight relief comes through permits written for named industries: ready-mixed concrete, fluid milk, timber, and super heavy single-trip. No permit is named for aggregate, stone, sand or quarry products. So a hauler out of the Medina Quarry gets the general Chapter 623 permit and nothing else, while the ready-mix truck loading the same rock further down the chain sits on the list.

That permit authorises axle weight plus ten per cent and gross plus five per cent, requires a fifteen thousand dollar bond, and makes the holder responsible 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 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.

Texas has no percentage threshold for salvage. Tex. Transp. Code § 501.091 brands a salvage motor vehicle where there is damage to, or a missing, major component part and the cost of repairs exceeds the actual cash value immediately before the damage — effectively one hundred per cent, against eighty in Florida and sixty in Oklahoma.

The calculation excludes repainting and sales tax. On a quarry truck the paint is the first thing the work takes and the last thing that matters, so that exclusion moves the answer a long way. Bexar County joins the emissions inspection programme on 1 November 2026 and Medina County is not on the list, but diesel vehicles are exempt regardless.

Tex. Transp. Code § 501.091. Information, not legal advice, and only as current as the date the rule file was last verified.

Those rules land the same way on every body style, and so does the offer. Whatever you drive, it does not change what we do next.

End dumps and belly dumps off the quarry lane. Flatbeds, day cabs and road tractors, dump trucks, rollbacks, box trucks, straight trucks, service bodies, and the work trucks and pickups that go with a crew.

We buy all of them. Castroville sits on the San Antonio side of Medina County, so coming to you and driving it away is straightforward and coming to you and towing it is just as normal. We can also buy it remotely and arrange the tow, and you are welcome to drive it to us. The Medina Quarry at 11.46 miles is the nearest thing on file to a reason there are trucks 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 come out to Medina County?Yes. 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, and driving it to us stays open if you prefer.
• My dump ran limestone out of the Medina Quarry.Then it weighed out on nearly every load, and we would like to hear about the hoist, the body floor and the tailgate. That is where a quarry truck shows its 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.
• Do I need an emissions test first?No. Diesel vehicles are exempt from Texas emissions inspection, and Medina County is not on the programme county list in any case.

Those are the mechanics. The reasons behind a call are more personal than that.

Retiring. A medical that went the wrong way. A hauling contract that ended and left a truck standing in a Medina County yard, going nowhere and costing something to keep.

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, whether it ran the 11.46 miles to the Medina Quarry or never left town.