Colorado County
Sand plants a hundred miles from the field they feed
Two industrial-sand operations sit here, recording 9 and 11 employees. The larger of the pair is run by Alleyton Resource, and both are carried by MSHA under the commodity string that means frac sand.
The geography is the interesting part. This pair sits roughly 100 miles east of the Eagle Ford core, between San Antonio and Houston, which is a long way for in-basin sand to be. In-basin normally means the mine is next to the well.
One of the two carries a county disagreement: its record says Colorado County while its coordinate reverse-geocodes to Fayette. It is flagged rather than corrected, because a guess would be worse than a flag.
So this sand travels further than the in-basin idea suggests
Those 100 miles matter to anybody selling a truck out of here. A short in-basin shuttle and a hundred-mile haul are different jobs with different wear.
It also puts this pair between two large metros rather than out in the field, which gives a seller something the far-west basin towns do not have: a deep general used-truck market on either side.
What does carry over from the basin is the queue. Wellsite waiting still puts hours on an engine that the odometer never records, however far the load travelled. Alleyton Resource runs that pattern out of Colorado County like everybody else.
Texas weight law
One ceiling, and a permit list that skips stone
Those hauls run under one statutory ceiling, and sand 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 equipment is equipment we buy. Pneumatic tankers and belly dumps off the Alleyton Resource and Duncan Plant work. Flatbeds that carried sealed boxes. Day cabs and road tractors, dump trucks, rollbacks, box trucks, straight trucks, service bodies, and the work trucks and pickups that go with a crew.
The single rail yard here sits 1.80 miles out and attaches by nearest-centroid fallback, so it is a weaker association than it looks and this page says so.
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 Eagle Lake
- 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 proppant.Then it has worked harder than a cement tank, because sand is chosen for hardness. Duncan Plant equipment usually has. Worth telling us.
- It ran the long haul rather than a short shuttle.Common from Colorado County, where the field is about 100 miles off. Real miles as well as hours — tell us 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 completion schedule going quiet, 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 Duncan Plant and out across Colorado 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.