We buy trucks in Kendleton

The row that attaches to Kendleton is recorded with operator Kansas City Southern, its coordinate 2.24 miles from the centroid by nearest-centroid fallback, and it is the only rail-yard row attached to this town.

Its name and its filing point at two different things. The name carries the word intermodal, which describes a place where containers and trailers move between rail and road. The type field carries rail yard, which is a place where trains are made and broken. Those are different operations with different truck traffic, and the record holds one of each description for the same row.

Fort Bend County keeps that ambiguity company. It carries four rows: this one, a separate intermodal ramp, and two sand and gravel operations. So an intermodal facility does exist in this county under its own type — which makes the naming on this row a question worth flagging rather than resolving. We are not going to pick the field we prefer.

The useful thing is that for a seller the two readings converge more than they diverge.

A container facility like the Kansas City Southern row 2.24 miles out generates drayage: day cabs pulling chassis, yard tractors shunting inside the fences, box trucks and dry vans moving freight the last few miles. A classification yard generates local switching work and transload haulage, which is much the same shape of trucking with different boxes on it. Either way this is short-radius, high-cycle work rather than long haul, and either way the odometer understates it.

Around both there is the county’s other trade. Two sand and gravel rows in Fort Bend County put belly dumps and tandem dumps on the same prairie roads, hauling into the construction edge spreading west out of the Houston metro. That mix — freight equipment and aggregate equipment in the same few miles — is why we ask what a truck actually did rather than reading it off the body. A day cab that pulled chassis and one that pulled a dump trailer have had different lives at the same mileage.

Both trades run under a single ceiling, and neither 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. General freight is on none of them and neither is aggregate, so the container hauler and the belly dump both take the general Chapter 623 route while a ready-mix truck on the same construction job sits on the list.

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 yard tractor or a dump truck, where the paint is the first casualty of the work, that exclusion covers most of what is visibly wrong.

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, yard tractors and terminal spotters, box trucks and dry vans off the freight side. Belly dumps, end dumps and tandem dumps off the sand side, flatbeds and stake beds, water trucks, rollbacks, reefers, service bodies, and the crew pickups behind them.

We buy all of them. Kendleton is a small place with the metro within reach, 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 Kansas City Southern row at 2.24 miles is one of four across Fort Bend County, alongside an intermodal ramp and two sand and gravel operations.

• 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. They are usually high-hour and low-mileage, which is what we expect from them rather than a mark against them, and around a Kansas City Southern facility they come up regularly.
• How quickly can you get here?Fort Bend 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.
• What does the yard handle?We do not know and we will not guess. The commodities could not be determined from any source read for this page — and the record is not even settled on whether it is an intermodal facility or a classification yard, since the name says one and the type field says the other.
• Do I need an emissions test to sell it?No. Diesel vehicles are exempt from Texas emissions inspection. Fort Bend 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 an outfit that has grown out of one truck and into another and needs the first one gone. Freight work is tied to lanes and shippers rather than seasons, and construction work west of the metro is tied to whatever is being built — both of which end on somebody else’s schedule and leave the equipment behind. With four rows in Fort Bend County and the Kansas City Southern yard 2.24 miles from here, there is no deep local trade waiting to absorb it.

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 Kendleton and across Fort Bend County.