We buy trucks in Hughes Springs

The rail yard here is recorded with operator the Texas & Northern Railway, its coordinate 1.80 miles from the centroid by nearest-centroid fallback, and it is the only rail-yard row attached to this town.

Its name carries a company name inside it — Lone Star Steel, written in the record without the space. That is worth pointing out and then leaving alone. Whether that company still occupies the site was not determined by the research behind this page, and nothing is asserted about it in either direction. A corporate name embedded in a node name records what something was called when the record was made, which is not the same as who is there now.

It is a pattern rather than a one-off: this is the seventh corporate name found embedded in a node name in this set. Names outlive occupancy, and a page that treats one as current is making a claim the record does not support.

That uncertainty about the site runs alongside a second gap, and together they set the honest limit of what this page can tell you.

The commodities handled at the yard could not be determined from any source read for the research behind this page. Nor is the coordinate a surveyed point: it is recorded as the mean of a track polyline’s vertices, a derivation every rail-yard row in the set shares, with a 75 miles radius applied as a set-wide constant flagged as estimated. So 1.80 miles is a real measurement of a derived point.

What is solid is the shape of the county. Morris County carries two rows in total — this yard and a crushed stone operation over at Mount Pleasant. That is a small record for a working county, and it means the trucks here belong to farms, small contractors, log and pulpwood haulers and the service trades behind them rather than to any large operation. Pine country roads, tight turns and soft shoulders put wear into a chassis that highway miles never do.

Whatever those trucks carried, 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. Timber being on that list matters in this part of the state, and aggregate not being on it matters just as much: a log truck out of the pines has a permit written for its trade while a stone hauler off the county’s other row takes the general Chapter 623 route.

That general 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 an old truck that has stood outdoors in the pines, where the paint went years ago and the mechanicals are sound, that exclusion moves the answer a long way.

Emissions inspection does not reach you. Diesel vehicles are not required to be emissions-inspected in Texas, and this county is not on the programme list either.

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.

Log trucks and pole trailers off the pine country, flatbeds and stake beds, day cabs and road tractors, tandem and tri-axle dumps, rollbacks, box trucks, water trucks, service bodies, and the crew pickups behind them.

We buy all of them. Hughes Springs is a small place well out from a dealer, so buying it remotely and arranging the tow is a normal path here rather than a last resort; coming to you and driving it away or towing it are both open, and driving it to us stays open too. The Texas & Northern Railway yard at 1.80 miles is one of only two rows on file across Morris County.

• 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, and on a truck that has stood outdoors here we expect it.
• Do you come out this far?We do, and buying it remotely and arranging the tow is open too, which at this distance is often simpler for everybody. The Texas & Northern Railway yard sits 1.80 miles from the middle of town and we go a great deal further than that. Driving it to us stays open as well.
• I have a log truck.We buy them. Timber has a Texas permit written for it where stone does not, so a log truck has been running under a different set of numbers from a rock truck on the same road, and we read the two differently.
• Is the steel company still there?We do not know. The name sits inside the yard name on the record, but whether that company still occupies the site was never determined, and we are not going to assert it either way just because a name persisted.
• Do I need an emissions test to sell it?No. Diesel vehicles are exempt from Texas emissions inspection, and Morris 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 an outfit that has grown out of one truck and into another and needs the first one gone. In a county carrying two rows on the whole record — the yard 1.80 miles from here and a stone operation at Mount Pleasant — there is no deep local trade waiting to take a truck off somebody’s hands when it comes free.

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 Hughes Springs and across Morris County.