Medina County
The one quarry on this lane that names its own rail loadout
The largest operation here records 48 employees under Martin Marietta, and its recorded name states a rail loadout in so many words. Of sixty-seven place entries written across four research batches it is the only node whose name says that.
It is rated for highway work too, carried in the state rated-source catalogue with its own producer code.
Two smaller rows sit with it: a quarry with 2 employees whose nearest active registration is 1.9 miles off, and a dimension-limestone plant with 11 under a differently named operator.
So a rail loadout keeps the trucks on a short leash
That single word in the name changes the whole trucking pattern, and it is worth spelling out why.
A quarry that loads railcars sends its long-distance tonnage by rail. What the trucks do is the short shuttle from face to loadout, over and over, inside the property. Very short legs, full every time, almost none of it on a public road.
It produces a particular kind of used truck: low mileage, high hours, a body that has been worked hard and a driveline that has barely stretched its legs. Martin Marietta runs that shuttle across Medina County all day.
Texas weight law
One ceiling, and a permit list that skips stone
Once those loads reach a public road they run under one statutory 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, 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 Martin Marietta shuttle. Flatbeds off the dimension-limestone side. Day cabs and road tractors, lowboys, rollbacks, box trucks, straight trucks, service bodies, and the work trucks and pickups that go with a crew.
One record here disagrees with itself and is worth knowing: the stone plant carries Medina County while its coordinate reverse-geocodes to Karnes County, roughly 70 miles east. It is flagged rather than corrected, and this page does not pretend to know which is right.
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 Hondo
- 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 has low miles but it is worn out.That is exactly what a Martin Marietta rail-loadout shuttle does to a truck. Not a problem — tell us the hours.
- The box is beaten up but the driveline is good.Normal here and not a disqualifier. 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.
- How far out do you come?All of Medina County and east toward Karnes County. Distance has never stopped a sale.
Why people call
Beyond a quarry fleet turning over, the reasons are personal ones. Retiring. A medical that went the wrong way. A truck bought for one contract that outlived it.
Yards around the Martin Marietta ground and across Medina County 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.