We buy trucks in Haslet

Two rows attach to Haslet and they are the same place seen twice. The ALLIANCE rail yard is recorded with operator BNSF Railway, its coordinate 1.28 miles from the centroid and inside the place, carried in Tarrant County. A second row, an intermodal ramp filed as Alliance, attaches here as well and is carried in Denton County.

A rail yard and an intermodal ramp are genuinely different things — one makes and breaks trains, the other lifts containers and trailers between rail and road — so two rows is not double counting. But the county split is a property of where the line runs rather than of the operation: Haslet straddles it, and the two halves of one complex landed on opposite sides.

It is worth knowing because a county answer here depends on which row you asked. Denton County carries five rows in total and Tarrant County carries 34, so the same facility contributes to two very different county pictures.

That intermodal ramp is the part that decides what is parked around here.

A ramp puts containers and trailers on the road for the last leg, and the work that grows around the BNSF Railway complex here is drayage and warehousing: day cabs pulling chassis and containers between the ramp and the distribution buildings, yard tractors shunting trailers inside the fences, and box trucks and straight trucks moving freight the rest of the way. Almost none of it is long haul, and a good deal of it never leaves the few square miles where Tarrant County meets Denton County.

That duty cycle wears equipment in a very particular way. Constant coupling and uncoupling, tight low-speed manoeuvring, heavy braking and a great deal of idling, so hours, clutch, brakes and fifth wheels all age well ahead of the odometer. A drayage day cab with modest mileage can have had a harder life than a highway tractor with three times as much, and we ask for the hour meter here as a matter of course — the yard sits 1.28 miles from the middle of town and a good deal of this work never goes further than that. The commodities handled at the yard itself could not be determined from any source read for the research behind this page, so what was in the boxes is a question for you rather than for the record.

Whatever came off that ramp, it moved under a single ceiling.

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. General freight is on none of them, which is the ordinary position for a container hauler: the box weighs what it weighs and the ceiling is the ceiling.

The general Chapter 623 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.

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 yard tractor that has spent years being rubbed along trailer noses and fence lines, that exclusion carries further than it sounds.

This county is on the Texas emissions inspection programme list, so the question comes up here often. It does not reach you: 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.

Day cabs and road tractors off the drayage runs, yard tractors and terminal spotters out of the yards. Box trucks and straight trucks, flatbeds and stake beds, reefers, dump trucks, rollbacks, service bodies, and the crew pickups behind them.

We buy all of them. Haslet is close in, so coming to you and driving it away is the ordinary case here and towing it is just as easy; buying it remotely and arranging the tow is open, and driving it to us stays open too. The BNSF Railway yard at 1.28 miles and the intermodal ramp over the Denton County line are the two rows on file at this town.

• 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.
• Do you buy yard tractors?Yes, and around the BNSF Railway yard 1.28 miles from here they come up often. They are usually high-hour and low-mileage, which is exactly what we expect from them rather than a mark against them.
• How quickly can you get here?Haslet 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 too, and so is driving it to us.
• The mileage is low for the age.Normal for drayage. Coupling cycles, low-speed manoeuvring and idling put hours and wear on a unit that the odometer never records, so we read the hour meter, the fifth wheel and the brakes first.
• Do I need an emissions test to sell it?No. Diesel vehicles are exempt from Texas emissions inspection. Tarrant County is on the programme list, which is why the question comes up, but the exemption answers it.
• 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. Drayage runs on contracts tied to a shipper or a ramp, and when one of those moves the equipment bought for it is surplus quickly — which in a corridor carrying rows in both Tarrant County and Denton County happens more often than it does in quieter places.

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 Haslet and along the Alliance corridor.