We buy trucks in Galveston

On 15 May 2024 a barge carrying vacuum gas oil struck the Pelican Island Causeway and partially collapsed a span, cutting the only road onto Pelican Island. Not the main road — the only one. Everything that reaches the storage terminals, the yards and the campus over there arrives across that single link or does not arrive at all.

It has since reopened, and the number that matters to a truck was restored with it: TxDOT Houston confirmed the bridge came back with its load limit at 80,000 lb, which is the ordinary Texas gross ceiling rather than a reduced posting. So a legal load crosses it today the same way it did before the strike.

What has not been settled is the replacement. Local officials report a funding gap of roughly $206 million for a new bridge, and a funding gap is not a schedule. We are stating the gap rather than guessing when it closes, because a seller over there is entitled to know the access question is open without being told an answer nobody has.

That single crossing shapes the equipment more than the island’s size does.

Five rows attach to this town and every one of them is a place where cargo changes mode: two liquid bulk terminals, one under Pelican Island Storage Terminal Inc. and one under Martin Midstream; two roll-on roll-off terminals at the Port of Galveston, carried as Terminal 1 and Terminal 8; and a principal port row over all of it. Terminals like those are where a ship or a tank becomes a truck, and the truck then does a short, heavy, repetitive run.

That work wears a unit in the way short-radius work always does — loading cycles, low-speed hours and salt air rather than highway miles. Coastal corrosion is the part sellers here tend to undersell: frames, brake lines, airlines, wiring and body mounts all take it, and a truck that has spent ten years within sight of the water reads differently from an inland one with the same odometer. We look at that directly rather than inferring it.

That restored 80,000 lb figure is the same number the whole state runs on.

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, each written for a named industry: ready-mixed concrete, fluid milk, timber, and super heavy single-trip. Fluid milk is a liquid with a permit and fuel is a liquid without one, so a tanker off a terminal here falls back to the general Chapter 623 route.

That permit adds ten per cent on the axle and five per cent on gross, takes a fifteen thousand dollar bond, and makes the holder responsible for actual damage to load-restricted roads and bridges. 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 — and on an island reached by one causeway, a posted bridge limit is not an abstraction.

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.

Texas has no percentage threshold for salvage. The section brands a truck salvage where there is damage to, or a missing, major component part and the cost of repairs exceeds the actual cash value immediately before the damage — effectively one hundred per cent, against eighty in Florida and sixty in Oklahoma, and the highest figure on file by a wide margin.

The calculation leaves out repainting and sales tax, which no other state on file excludes. On a coastal truck, where salt takes the paint before it takes anything else, that exclusion moves the answer a long way.

This county is not on the Texas emissions inspection programme list, and it would not reach you if it were: diesel vehicles are not required to be emissions-inspected in Texas.

Tex. Transp. Code § 501.091. Information, not legal advice, and only as current as the date the rule file was last verified.

Those rules land the same way on every body style, and so does the offer.

Tank trailers and straight tankers off the terminal work. Day cabs and road tractors, yard tractors and terminal spotters, flatbeds and stake beds, dump trucks, rollbacks, box trucks, straight trucks, reefers, service bodies, and the crew pickups behind all of it.

We buy all of them. Galveston is reachable and we come to you as a matter of course, towing it if it will not drive; buying it remotely and arranging the tow is open, and so is driving it to us. The two liquid bulk terminals — one under Pelican Island Storage Terminal Inc., one under Martin Midstream — the two roll-on roll-off terminals and the principal port row are the five entries on file at this town, out of twelve across the county, and the causeway to them carries a restored 80,000 lb limit.

• 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, which on this island is worth saying twice.
• My truck is on Pelican Island. Is that a problem?No. The Pelican Island Bridge reopened with its 80,000 lb load limit restored, so an ordinary legal load crosses it. The replacement is a separate question and it is unfunded to the tune of about $206 million, which we mention because it is open rather than because it stops anything today.
• It has surface rust from the salt.Expected here and not a disqualifier. What we look at is whether the frame, the brake lines, the airlines and the body mounts are sound, because coastal corrosion goes for those before it goes for the paint.
• How quickly can you get here?Galveston is well inside our normal range and we come to you as a matter of course. Buying it remotely and arranging the tow is open, and so is driving it to us.
• Do I need an emissions test to sell it?No. Diesel vehicles are exempt from Texas emissions inspection, and Galveston County is not on the programme list either way.
• 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.

Those are the mechanics. The reasons behind a call are more personal than that.

Retiring. A medical that went the wrong way. A contract that ended, or a company that has grown out of one truck and into another and needs the first one gone. Where Pelican Island is reached by one causeway and Martin Midstream and the terminals around it run on that link, there is usually a logistics reason mixed in with the personal one, and we do not need you to explain it.

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, in Galveston and along the county behind it.