We buy trucks in Fort Worth

Fifteen rail yards are filed under Fort Worth, which is a density that takes some explaining. Four carriers run them: BNSF Railway at Downtown and North, Union Pacific at Ginnie, Davidson, New, Ney and the Logging Yard, and the Fort Worth and Western Railroad at 8th Avenue and Hodge.

The clearest illustration of what that density does to records is on 9th Street. Two yards sit 0.02 miles apart — about a hundred feet — one under BNSF Railway and one under Union Pacific, one abbreviating Street to St and each tagged with its own carrier. They are two real yards, not one recorded twice.

One name in the set describes cargo rather than a place or an operator: the Logging Yard, at 5.14 miles. Very few names in the whole national list do that.

Those yards are not the only thing generating freight here. Air Force Plant 4 is a government-owned, contractor-operated aircraft factory, one of only four such numbered plants on file nationally. Naval Air Station Fort Worth Joint Reserve Base sits alongside it.

It makes for a freight mix that is unusually steady. Defence work does not follow a commodity cycle the way sand or stone does, and the yards keep running whatever the drilling is doing.

So a truck sold here has often had a duller, more regular life than one out of a shale county — which is generally good news for the driveline. Air Force Plant 4 and the Naval Air Station next to it do not follow a commodity cycle.

All of that traffic runs under one statutory ceiling, whatever it is carrying.

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.

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 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.

All of that iron is iron we buy. Day cabs and road tractors off the Hodge and Downtown yard traffic. Flatbeds off the plant work. Dump trucks and aggregate haulers, box trucks, straight trucks, rollbacks, tankers, service bodies, and the work trucks and pickups that go with a crew.

Most of it works north and west of downtown, around 9th Street, Ginnie and Ney.

Whatever you drive, the offer doesn’t change. We buy all of them. The Logging Yard at 5.14 miles and the Hodge row are where most of it turns up.

• 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.
• It was a contractor truck on base work. Any issue?None for us. Tell us what it did and we will take it from there.
• 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.
• How far out do you come?All of Tarrant County and out past Saginaw. Distance has never stopped a sale.

Beyond a steady run finally ending, the reasons are personal ones. Retiring. A medical that went the wrong way. A truck left when a family business closed and nobody wanting to be the one to scrap it.

Yards around Saginaw and the 8th Avenue line 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 past Saginaw the same tractors come up for sale for the same reasons, and the Fort Worth and Western Railroad line sees a steady turnover of them. The Fort Worth and Western Railroad line and the roads around Air Force Plant 4 see a steady turnover.