We buy trucks in Crawford

One extraction row attaches to Crawford, and it attaches closer than any other Texas row researched so far. The Crawford Mine & Mill is carried as crushed and broken limestone, operator of record Lhoist North America of Texas, LLC, with 43 employees reported to MSHA, and it resolves within the place radius at 0.34 miles.

That figure was the tightest city attachment among the 40 Texas nodes researched at the time it was recorded, and it is not a filing curiosity. A third of a mile means the operation is effectively inside the town, so the first mile of every plant-feed trip is residential street rather than haul road.

The operator points somewhere as well. The USGS directory of lime plants lists Lhoist’s Clifton plant over in Bosque County and does not list Crawford at all, which is consistent with a mine and mill feeding the lime chain rather than a kiln standing on its own. It is the second Lhoist mine and mill in this state’s rows, after Nolanville in Bell County.

That reading changes what the truck traffic here actually is.

A kiln takes stone in and sends product out. A mine and mill takes stone out of the ground, crushes and grinds it, and ships it on to be burned somewhere else — so the outbound movement from a site like this is intermediate material heading to a plant rather than finished lime heading to a customer. Bosque County is next door, which makes that a short outbound run on county and state roads rather than a highway haul.

For a truck, short runs with a lot of loading cycles is the wear pattern, and the 0.34 miles matters again: a body that starts every trip on residential pavement collects a different sort of life from one that never leaves a pit. Limestone is also dense, so a dump body fills by weight long before it fills by volume, and the deck, tailgate and hoist carry that rather than the tyres.

Those dense loads sit under a single ceiling, and the rock 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, each 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 out of the mine and mill gets the general permit and nothing else, while a ready-mix truck on the same road 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, takes 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.

One Texas rule 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. It is a two-part test rather than pure arithmetic: there must also be damage to, or a missing, major component part.

The calculation leaves out repainting and sales tax, which no other state on file excludes. On a quarry truck, where the paint is the first thing the work takes, that exclusion moves the answer a long way.

Emissions inspection does not reach you. Diesel vehicles are not required to be emissions-inspected in Texas, and this county is not on the programme list, so the question closes before the county matters.

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.

Dump trucks and end dumps off the stone run. Flatbeds and stake beds, day cabs and road tractors, rollbacks, box trucks, straight trucks, water trucks, service bodies, and the crew pickups behind them.

We buy all of them. The mine and mill sits 0.34 miles from the centre of town and its product runs on towards Bosque County, so the trucks we see here are short-haul trucks. Crawford is close in, so coming to you and driving it away is the ordinary case and coming to you and towing it is just as easy; we can also buy it remotely and arrange the tow, and driving it to us stays open. The Crawford Mine & Mill under Lhoist North America is the one extraction row on file at this town, and the county carries eight rows in total across crushed stone, sand and gravel, and cement.

• 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.
• How quickly can you get here?Crawford is well inside our normal range and we come to you as a matter of course. Buying it remotely and arranging the tow is open too if you would rather not be there, and so is driving it to us.
• My dump truck ran short local loads.Then we look at the body, the hoist and the tailgate before the odometer. A truck working 0.34 miles from the plant collects loading cycles far faster than it collects miles, and that is the life we are reading.
• Do I need an emissions test to sell it?No. Diesel vehicles are exempt from Texas emissions inspection, and McLennan County is not on the programme list either way.
• 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.
• Is this a lime plant?Not on the record. The USGS directory lists Lhoist’s Clifton plant in Bosque County and does not list Crawford, which reads as a mine and mill feeding the lime chain rather than a kiln. We would rather hand you that distinction than tidy it away.

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

Retiring. A medical that went the wrong way. A yard closing, or a company that has grown out of one truck and into another and needs the first one gone. Lhoist North America runs sites across several counties here — the Clifton plant over in Bosque County, and a second mine and mill at Nolanville in Bell County — and a company spread that way turns equipment over for reasons that have nothing to do with any one of them.

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, in Crawford and across McLennan County.