Marion County
Two railroads, two yards, four hundred yards apart
Two rail yards sit here and both are genuinely inside the place: one at 0.17 miles from the centre under Union Pacific and one at 0.61 miles under Kansas City Southern.
They lie 0.44 miles apart — a little over four hundred yards — and each carries a parenthetical tag that matches its own carrier field.
What makes the pair unusual is what is missing between them. There is no untagged base row: neither railroad claims the plain name. Where a town has one railroad, the yard is usually just the town’s name; where two share it, both tag themselves and nobody gets the bare version.
So a truck here has two interchanges within walking distance
That arrangement is genuinely convenient for road haulage, whatever it does to the records.
Two competing railroads inside half a mile means a load can go on either without a repositioning run, and the drayage legs are as short as legs get. It is dropping and hooking rather than driving.
The consequence for anybody selling is the usual one in a yard town: the hour meter climbs and the odometer does not, so a Marion County day cab is generally older in service than it looks on the dash. Union Pacific holds the 0.17-mile row and Kansas City Southern the other.
Texas weight law
One ceiling, and a permit list that skips stone
However short the leg, it runs 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. Day cabs and yard tractors off the Union Pacific and Kansas City Southern traffic. Flatbeds and box trucks off the local distribution side. Dump trucks, rollbacks, straight trucks, tankers, service bodies, and the work trucks and pickups that go with a crew.
Two yards 0.44 miles apart in a county this size is a lot of gate traffic, and it turns equipment over accordingly.
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 Jefferson
- 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.
- The hours are high and the miles are low.Normal for a yard tractor working two rows 0.44 miles apart. Not a problem — tell us the hours.
- It pulled for both railroads.Common across Marion County with Union Pacific and Kansas City Southern this close together. No difference to us.
- 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 contract ending, the reasons are personal ones. Retiring. A medical that went the wrong way. One tractor too many after a lease finished.
Yards across Marion County usually have one waiting, whether off the Union Pacific row 0.17 miles out or the Kansas City Southern one.
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.