Williamson County
Four operators, and none of them big
Four separate operators run pits here — Wilco Aggregates, Espinoza Stone, McCar Materials and Resource Materials — and between them they record 43 employees. Brauer Pit 1 is the largest at 23. Stone Pit 4 and the Salado Plant run 8 apiece, McCar Materials Quarry runs 7, and Resource Materials 5.
The dimension-stone side is smaller again. Aguado Stone reports 8 and Bernardo’s Pit records a single employee.
Every one of them has to be on a register. Under the state administrative code each quarry or pit must register each extraction location ten business days before extraction begins, which is why the paperwork here is unusually legible.
Two of those rows sit somewhere other than where they are filed
Those registration records also expose a wrinkle worth knowing about. The Salado Plant is named for a place in Bell County and attaches here in Williamson County, about fifteen miles up the interstate.
Aguado Stone is further out still: its coordinate lands 19.2 miles west, in Burnet County rather than the one on its record. Neither was corrected by guess, and neither should be.
It matters for one practical reason. Williamson is one of the seventeen Texas emissions counties and Bell and Burnet are not, so which side of a line a truck is registered on is a real question here even though diesel is exempt from the programme.
Texas weight law
One ceiling, and a permit list that skips stone
All of those loads run under one statutory ceiling, and stone is not on the relief list.
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 Brauer Pit and Stone Pit work. Flatbeds off the Aguado Stone side, where the load leaves as block rather than as gravel. Day cabs, rollbacks, box trucks, straight trucks, service bodies, and the work trucks and pickups that go with a crew.
Four operators averaging under eleven people each means small fleets, and small fleets sell equipment one truck at a time rather than in lots.
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 Jarrell
- 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.
- My truck is registered in Bell County but works here.Common around the Salado Plant and not a problem. Diesel vehicles are exempt from the state emissions programme either way.
- It hauled block rather than gravel.Espinoza Stone and Aguado Stone work produces those, and we buy the flatbeds that carried 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.
- Do you have to come out to look at it?Not necessarily. We can come to you and drive it away, come and tow it, buy it remotely and arrange the tow, or you can drive it to us. Whichever suits the truck and your week.
Why people call
Beyond a small pit slowing down, the reasons are personal ones. Retiring. A medical that went the wrong way. A truck sitting since a contract ended.
Yards around Wilco Aggregates and out toward Burnet County usually have one waiting, and the 19.2 miles between the record and the rock is about how spread out this is.
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.