We buy trucks in Justin

The row that attaches to Justin is a rail yard recorded with operator BNSF Railway, its coordinate 3.46 miles from the centroid, reaching this town by nearest-centroid fallback. It is the only rail-yard row attached here.

It is not the only row of its name. A second yard carrying the same name is filed under Haslet, 3.96 miles away, under the same carrier. Alliance is an intermodal and airport complex north of Fort Worth spanning several municipalities, so one complex has been recorded twice and hung on two different small towns.

And there is a further turn in it. This row’s coordinate lies inside Fort Worth city limits — a place that carries a page of its own — while the row itself is filed under Justin. So of the two entries, one sits inside the large city that neither of them is filed under. None of that is a defect we can fix; the record is read-only. It is a reason to treat the attachment as an approximate answer rather than an address.

Those filing questions do not change what the ground actually does, and the ground is a freight complex.

The complex 3.46 miles from here, north of Fort Worth, generates drayage and warehousing: day cabs pulling chassis and containers between ramps and distribution buildings, yard tractors shunting trailers inside fences, and box trucks and dry vans taking freight the last few miles. Around the edges of that, in a Denton County that also carries three sand and gravel rows, there is aggregate and construction work following the housing edge north.

Both patterns are short-radius and hard on the same parts. Coupling cycles, tight low-speed manoeuvring, heavy braking and long idling put hours, clutch, brakes and fifth wheel well ahead of the odometer, and a unit with modest mileage can have had a harder life than a highway tractor with three times as much. The commodities handled at the yard could not be determined from any source read for the research behind this page, so what was in the boxes is something you will have to tell us.

Whatever came off that complex, 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. General freight appears on none of them, which is the ordinary position for a container hauler — the box weighs what it weighs. Aggregate is absent too, so the sand trucks working the rest of Denton County are in the same position.

The general Chapter 623 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 yard tractor that has spent years being rubbed along trailer noses and fence posts, that exclusion covers most of what is visibly wrong with it.

This county is on the Texas emissions inspection programme list, so the question comes up here. It does not reach you: diesel vehicles are not required to be emissions-inspected in Texas.

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.

Day cabs and road tractors off the drayage runs, yard tractors and terminal spotters out of the yards. Box trucks, straight trucks and dry vans, flatbeds and stake beds, tandem dumps off the sand and construction side, reefers, rollbacks, service bodies, and the crew pickups behind them.

We buy all of them. Justin is close in, so coming to you and driving it away is the ordinary case 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 yard filed at 3.46 miles is one of five rows across Denton County, three of which are sand and gravel.

• 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.
• Do you buy yard tractors?Yes, and around a complex like this one they come up often. They are usually high-hour and low-mileage, which is exactly what we expect from them rather than a mark against them.
• How quickly can you get here?Denton County is well inside 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.
• Is the yard actually in Justin?On the record it is filed here at 3.46 miles, but its coordinate lies inside Fort Worth city limits, and a second row of the same name is filed under Haslet 3.96 miles away. One complex, two entries, two small towns, and neither of them the city the coordinate falls in. We would rather show you that than tidy it.
• Do I need an emissions test to sell it?No. Diesel vehicles are exempt from Texas emissions inspection. Denton County is on the programme list, which is why the question comes up, but the exemption answers 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.

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 a company that has grown out of one truck and into another and needs the first one gone. Drayage runs on contracts tied to a shipper or a ramp, and when one moves the equipment bought for it is surplus quickly — which around a complex spanning several municipalities, filed 3.46 miles from here and reaching into both Denton County and Fort Worth, happens more often than it does in quieter places.

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 Justin and across the freight country around it.