We buy trucks in Houston

Twenty-five rail yards are filed under Houston, under three carriers, running from 1.96 to 13.68 miles out. The Port Terminal Railroad Association holds a set of them — American, Basin, Booth, and the Chevron Phillips row out at Pasadena — and Union Pacific holds most of the rest: Congress, Dallerup, East Belt, Englewood, Eureka.

That is not a coincidence of naming. The ship channel area supports the second-largest petrochemical complex in the world, and the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway adds seventy-seven billion dollars of economic activity in Texas a year. The yards exist because the plants do.

The mineral side is here too, and it is more specialised than it looks. The Houston Plant carries thirty-five employees and works barite. Vibrantz Minerals runs ten and is filed under iron ore, though what it actually makes is iron-oxide pigment. Texas Architectural Aggregate reports thirty-six. Houston is the deepest industrial truck market in the country, and all of it sits in one county.

Those plants and yards are close together, which sounds like an easy day and is not. Freight planners record a twenty-mile move on the port-to-plant corridors stretching to two hours in a weekday peak.

Two hours for twenty miles is an idling engine, a working transmission and a driver’s day gone. It puts hours on a truck at a rate the odometer will never show, and it is the single most misleading thing about a Houston truck’s mileage.

None of that stops us buying. It does mean we would rather hear the hours than the miles. The Port Terminal Railroad Association rows run out to 13.68 miles, and the queue is the same on all of them.

Those same corridors sit under one statutory ceiling, and the permit list is narrower than most people expect.

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.

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.

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 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.

All of that iron is iron we buy. Tankers off the petrochemical work, both pneumatic and liquid. Day cabs and road tractors off the container ramps. Dump trucks and aggregate haulers off Texas Architectural Aggregate and the sales yards. Flatbeds, rollbacks, box trucks, straight trucks, service bodies, and the work trucks and pickups that go with a crew.

Most of it works out of the yards along the channel, around Englewood, East Belt and the Port Terminal rows.

Whatever you drive, the offer doesn’t change. We buy all of them. Texas Architectural Aggregate and the Chevron Phillips end of the channel are where most of it turns up.

• 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. Is that a problem?Not in itself. Tell us what it carried and whether it has been cleaned, and we will take it from there.
• The hours are high and the miles are low.That is the normal shape of a port truck and it is 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.
• How far out do you come?All of Harris County, out through Galena Park and down the channel. Distance has never stopped a sale.

Beyond a contract that ended, the reasons are personal ones. Retiring. A medical that went the wrong way. A back that has had enough of the queue on the channel road.

Yards around Galena Park and out toward Pasadena 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. Out through Galena Park the same tractors come up for sale for the same reasons. Galena Park and the Port Terminal Railroad Association yards usually have one waiting.