Cooke County
A county seat on the interstate, ten miles from another state
The quarry here is Cooke County Crushed Stone with 6 employees, and where it sits matters as much as what it digs. The operation is at the county seat, on the interstate, about ten miles from the Oklahoma line.
That proximity is not scenery. It means routing and registration decisions get made with a state border inside a short drive, which is a live consideration for anybody running a truck rather than a piece of trivia.
One rail yard attaches, 0.32 miles from the centre of town, and it is the only one here.
So a truck here works two states whether or not it means to
That ten miles changes the paperwork question more than the driving one.
Interstate running brings registration, fuel-tax and routing obligations that a purely in-state truck never meets, and a Cooke County operator sitting this close to a line usually has them. It is worth knowing what a truck was set up for before it changes hands.
The hauling itself is ordinary: aggregate off the Cooke County Crushed Stone ground, general freight off the corridor, and the distribution work of a county seat with a yard 0.32 miles from its middle.
Texas weight law
One ceiling, and a permit list that skips stone
On this side of the line it runs under one statutory ceiling, and that is the one this page states.
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. Dump trucks and aggregate haulers off the Cooke County Crushed Stone ground. Day cabs and road tractors off the interstate work. Flatbeds, rollbacks, box trucks, straight trucks, tankers, service bodies, and the work trucks and pickups that go with a crew.
The yard 0.32 miles from the middle of town and the corridor through it keep a steady flow of equipment turning over.
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 Gainesville
- 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 is registered for interstate work.Not a problem and worth telling us. Cooke County trucks ten miles from Oklahoma usually are.
- The box is beaten up but the driveline is good.Common on Crushed Stone work here and not a problem. Tell us about 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 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 Cooke County Crushed Stone pit usually have one waiting, and the yard 0.32 miles from the centre sees its share.
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.