We buy trucks in Hull

The row that attaches to Hull is a liquid bulk terminal carried under Keyera Energy, its coordinate 0.82 miles from the centroid by nearest-centroid fallback. That is the working fact. The other one is about the ground it stands on.

This place sits on the Hull salt dome, and that dome has produced two recorded sinkholes on its northwestern flank at Daisetta. The 2008 one grew to roughly 600 feet across and 75 feet deep, and it swallowed oil tanks and several vehicles. A second formed on 2 April 2023 with a water-filled diameter of about 70 metres, immediately adjacent to the south-western edge of the first, on the same flank.

We are stating locations and dates and stopping there. Those events were at Daisetta on a particular flank of the dome, and nothing in the record we hold connects them to any named facility or to any yard where a truck might be parked. We are not going to draw that line, because it would be an invented claim about somebody’s business rather than a fact about the country.

Beyond that geology, what actually puts trucks on these roads is more ordinary and much more numerous.

Liberty County carries 14 rows, and 12 of them are extraction: nine sand and gravel operations and three industrial mineral ones, with a single rail yard and this one terminal alongside them. That is a sand county with a liquid terminal in it rather than a terminal town. The equipment that comes free around here is mostly aggregate equipment.

Which means belly dumps and end dumps, tandem and tri-axle dumps, and the loaders and water trucks that go with a pit — plus, from the Keyera Energy terminal 0.82 miles out, tank trailers running short repetitive turns from a rack. Wet sand carries water weight and sticks, so bodies, floors and gates take a harder life than dry rock gives them, and on the tanker side it is the pump and valve gear and the hour meter that tell the story rather than the odometer. We ask which of the two a truck did rather than reading it off the body style.

Both of those loads run under a single ceiling, and neither commodity has relief written for it.

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; aggregate, stone and sand are named nowhere at all. So the belly dump out of a Liberty County pit and the tanker off the rack take the same 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.

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 truck that has worked wet sand in this climate, where the paint goes early, 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.

Belly dumps and end dumps off the sand runs, tank trailers and straight tankers off the terminal side. Tandem and tri-axle dump trucks, day cabs and road tractors, water trucks, flatbeds and stake beds, rollbacks, box trucks, service bodies, and the crew pickups behind them.

We buy all of them. Hull is a small place but reachable, so coming to you and driving it away is ordinary 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 Keyera Energy row at 0.82 miles is the only liquid terminal among the 14 rows across Liberty County, the other 12 of which are pits and plants.

• 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 in this climate we expect it.
• My belly dump ran wet sand.Then the body floor, the gate and the seals are what we look at rather than the mileage. Wet material sticks and carries water weight, so it works a body far harder than dry rock does — and with nine sand and gravel rows in Liberty County, it is the common case here.
• How quickly can you get here?Hull is within 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.
• What about the sinkholes?They are on the record and we will not pretend otherwise: one at Daisetta in 2008 that reached roughly 600 feet across and 75 feet deep, and another in April 2023 beside it on the same flank of the dome. What we will not do is connect them to any particular yard or business, because nothing we hold supports that.
• Do I need an emissions test to sell it?No. Diesel vehicles are exempt from Texas emissions inspection, and Liberty 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 job that finished, or an outfit that has grown out of one truck and into another and needs the first one gone. In a Liberty County running on twelve pits and plants, with the Keyera Energy terminal 0.82 miles from here the only one of its kind, work is tied to whatever is being built nearby — and when a job ends the equipment bought for it sits until somebody decides what happens next.

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 Hull and across Liberty County.