Brazoria County
A port that moved up two places in one year
The port here and its community handled 39.3 million tons of foreign waterborne cargo in the 2025 calendar year, and the direction of travel is up: total foreign tonnage rose 8.7% over the previous year.
The rankings moved with it. It stood 13th nationally in foreign waterborne tonnage, up from 14th, and 4th among the state’s ports, up from 5th.
The composition is the part that decides what the trucks carry. It ranks 6th nationally in chemicals, which is a very different cargo mix from a container port or a grain one.
So this is tank work, and the plants are the customer
That chemicals ranking is the fact to build on. A port 6th in the country for chemicals is surrounded by plants rather than warehouses.
What moves by road is liquid and pellet: tankers running product between dock, tank farm and unit, with a gate queue at each end and very few long legs. The South Hoskins yard 1.55 miles out under Union Pacific is the only rail row here and it works the same traffic.
The queues fill the hour meter and leave the odometer alone, which is the single most misleading thing about a Brazoria County truck if you judge it on mileage.
Texas weight law
One ceiling, and a permit list that skips stone
All of that plant traffic runs under one statutory ceiling, whatever is in the tank.
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 iron is iron we buy. Tankers off the chemical work, liquid and pneumatic both. Vacuum trucks and service bodies off maintenance and turnarounds. Day cabs and road tractors off the South Hoskins traffic, flatbeds, dump trucks, rollbacks, box trucks, straight trucks, and the work trucks and pickups that go with a crew.
A port growing 8.7% in a year keeps a great deal of equipment busy across Brazoria County, and fleets turn over on maintenance schedules rather than in a rush.
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 Freeport
- 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.
- It hauled chemicals.Not a problem in itself. Tell us what it carried and whether the tank has been cleaned, and we will take it from there.
- The hours are high and the miles are low.Normal for plant work around the South Hoskins yard 1.55 miles out. Not a problem — tell us the hours.
- 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 turnaround standing down, the reasons are personal ones. Retiring. A medical that went the wrong way. A back that has had enough of the plant road.
Yards across Brazoria County and around the South Hoskins row 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.