Liberty County
A sand plant, and a rail yard that says what it stores
The industrial-sand operation here is the Liberty Materials Moss Hill Plant, recording 6 employees, and it belongs to a group of four rows in this county and Montgomery County north-east of Houston.
That group is worth naming precisely, because the commodity code invites a wrong reading. These are carried under the same MSHA string that means frac sand in the Permian and the Eagle Ford, and the research is explicit that they are not oilfield sand districts in that sense.
The single rail yard here, 1.98 miles out under Union Pacific, is named for plastic storage — a description of what sits on it rather than a place name, which is uncommon.
So the market is a city, and the loads are resin as well as sand
Those two facts together describe the local traffic better than either alone.
Sand out of the Moss Hill Plant runs into the Houston construction and industrial market rather than to a well pad. Resin pellets sit on the rail yard waiting to go the same way. Both are highway runs into a metro with a delivery at the end rather than a wellsite queue.
It is a steadier life for a truck than proppant work: more miles moving, fewer hours standing, and a tank that has not been scoured by material chosen for hardness. Liberty Materials ground and the yard 1.98 miles out both feed it.
Texas weight law
One ceiling, and a permit list that skips stone
Sand or resin, those runs sit under one statutory ceiling.
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 equipment is equipment we buy. Belly dumps and end dumps off the Liberty Materials work. Pneumatic tankers off the resin and specialty sand traffic. Day cabs and road tractors for the metro runs, flatbeds, dump trucks, rollbacks, box trucks, straight trucks, service bodies, and the work trucks and pickups that go with a crew.
The yard 1.98 miles out and the plant between them keep a steady flow of equipment turning over in Liberty County.
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 Dayton
- 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.
- My tanker carried resin pellets.Ordinary here given what sits on the yard 1.98 miles out. Tell us what it ran and whether it has been cleaned.
- Is my sand tanker the hard-worked kind?Not necessarily. Liberty Materials work is construction and industrial sand rather than proppant, which is easier on a tank.
- 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 supply contract ending, the reasons are personal ones. Retiring. A medical that went the wrong way. A truck bought for one run that outlived it.
Yards around the Moss Hill Plant and out toward Montgomery 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.