Wise County
Three quarries, and the big one ships to a city
Three crushed-stone operations attach here. The North Bridgeport Quarry is much the largest at 60 employees, and the other two record 20 and 11.
The big one is rated for highway work and its owner describes it plainly: Martin Marietta carries the North Bridgeport Quarry as about sixty miles from the Dallas–Fort Worth metro area, served by truck and by rail.
That places this town inside the largest single place cluster among the 160 nodes researched in that group. Eight rows across Wise County record 362 employees between them, and these three are part of it.
So the trucks here are highway trucks that happen to haul rock
Those sixty miles are the fact that shapes the equipment. A pit shuttle and a metro run are not the same job.
A loaded hour at road speed, then an empty hour back, several times a day. It puts genuine mileage on a driveline in a way a short pit cycle never does, and it means the odometer on a Wise County truck is telling the truth.
Rail service at the North Bridgeport Quarry takes some of that off the road, but the last leg into a job site is a truck leg wherever the stone started, and Martin Marietta runs both ends of it.
Texas weight law
One ceiling, and a permit list that skips stone
Those loaded highway legs 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 North Bridgeport Quarry and the two smaller rows. Day cabs and road tractors for the metro run. Flatbeds, lowboys, rollbacks, box trucks, straight trucks, service bodies, and the work trucks and pickups that go with a crew.
A Martin Marietta operation of 60 people inside a county cluster of 362 turns over a great deal of equipment.
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 Chico
- 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 mileage is high for a quarry truck.Expected here. Martin Marietta loads run about sixty miles to the metro, so these are highway trucks that happen to haul stone.
- The box is beaten up but the driveline is good.Common across Wise County and not a problem. Tell us about both.
- 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 fleet turning over, the reasons are personal ones. Retiring. A medical that went the wrong way. A truck bought for one contract that outlived it.
Yards around the North Bridgeport Quarry and across Wise 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.