Dallas County
An intermodal town, and the yards say so
Eight rail yards are filed under Dallas, and two of the names give away what the city does with freight. Dallas IMF is an intermodal facility; Dallas TOFC is trailer-on-flatcar. Those are not names a bulk-commodity town produces.
Union Pacific runs most of them — Browder at 5.82 miles from the centre, Miller at 5.57, Cadiz and C J both at 2.61, and Dallas TOFC at 6.18. Kansas City Southern holds the two intermodal rows at 7.05 and 7.14 miles, which are the same facility recorded twice, one name being the other with a carrier tag added.
The eighth is Mockingbird, and its operator field reads Dallas Area Rapid Transit — a passenger railroad, not a freight one. It is in the list, so it is on this page, but it is not a truck destination and it would be wrong to imply otherwise.
Which makes the work here drayage, not line-haul
Those intermodal rows describe a specific job: pull a container or a trailer from the ramp, run it to a warehouse, come back. Short legs, many of them, all day.
It is hard on a truck in ways a long run is not. Constant coupling, low-speed manoeuvring in tight yards, and a great deal of idling in queues that the odometer never records. A drayage day cab can be worn out at a mileage a highway truck would call broken in.
None of that stops us buying. It does mean the hours matter more than the miles, and we would rather hear about the hours. A ramp turn under Kansas City Southern at 7.05 miles is a short leg by any measure.
Texas weight law
One ceiling, and a permit list that skips stone
Those short runs sit under the same statutory ceiling as every other truck in the state.
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 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. Day cabs and road tractors off the Dallas IMF and Dallas TOFC ramps. Box trucks and straight trucks off the warehouse end of the same run. Flatbeds, rollbacks, dump trucks, tankers, service bodies, and the work trucks and pickups that go with a crew.
Most of it works out of the yards south and east of downtown, around Browder, Miller and Cadiz.
Whatever you drive, the offer doesn’t change. We buy all of them. Union Pacific runs the Browder, Miller and Cadiz ends of it.
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 Dallas
- 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 engine is out of it. Is that different?Yes, and that is the line. A tired engine is fine; an engine that has been pulled out and sold means we can’t buy the truck.
- 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.
- My truck is a drayage tractor with high hours. Still interested?Yes. High hours on a low odometer is the normal shape of a Dallas truck and it is not a problem.
- How far out do you come?All of Dallas County and out through Mesquite. Distance has never stopped a sale.
Why people call
Beyond a truck that has simply done its turns, the reasons are personal ones. Retiring. A medical that went the wrong way. A lease that ended and left one tractor too many in the yard.
Yards around Browder and out toward Mesquite 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. Out toward Mesquite the same tractors come up for sale for the same reasons, and the Kansas City Southern ramps see a steady turnover of them. Union Pacific and Kansas City Southern ramps both see a steady turnover of them.