Dallas is the distribution floor of North Texas, 340 square miles of warehouses with a rail ramp at each end. The intermodal terminal at Wilmer and the ramp at Mesquite put the boxes on rail, the Mockingbird and Miller yards handle the carloads, and more than 8,000 carriers are based inside the city. One job in eighteen here is in transportation and warehousing, with manufacturing and wholesale each close behind.
So a Dallas yard holds a day cab draying boxes off Wilmer, a box truck on the paper and household-goods routes, a flatbed with steel coil, a tanker off the truck rack in the city, and the semi truck with a sleeper that runs the long lanes, because nearly four in ten of the drivers reported here work interstate beyond a hundred miles.
Elm Street, twelfth floor
The Dallas County Tax Office at 500 Elm Street, Suite 1200, records the title transfer and starts a certified copy of a lost title for the Department of Motor Vehicles, which is how Texas does title work in every county. Liens, the bonded route and the fact that no diesel truck is asked for an emissions test are covered on the Texas page.
A distribution day cab lives in short cycles and shows it at the fifth wheel, the clutch and the steps; a long-haul sleeper in its drivetrain and its service file. Photograph those first, then the cab and the engine, and tell us the ramp or the lane it worked.
Thirty posted bridges and Kiest Boulevard
Dallas runs the Texas statute, the federal 80,000 pounds on the interstates and the state axle figures the Texas page sets out, over 1,551 bridges inside the city, thirty of them posted for load and eight below fourteen feet, the lowest at eleven feet one where East Kiest Boulevard crosses the shopping center drive on the south side. A tandem dump truck that worked the south side has read those signs.
Tell us where the truck is in Dallas, down by Wilmer and Hutchins, out by Mesquite or by the rack, and send photos and the title.