We buy trucks in Killeen

The stone operation here is the Gibbs Quarry, in Bell County, with fourteen people on the federal mine register. That is a working crew rather than a two-man pit, and it means loaded trucks leave on a schedule.

What makes this one unusual on paper is that the state has graded its rock. The Texas highway department’s rated-source catalogue for bituminous work, in its September 2022 edition, lists the producer as Killeen Crushed Stone Gibbs under producer code 0901408 and gives it Surface Aggregate Classification B.

The two measured numbers behind that grade are an abrasion figure of 27 on the Los Angeles test and a magnesium sulfate soundness figure of 17. The first is how much the stone wears when tumbled; the second is how it survives repeated wetting and drying. Both are why a classification exists at all: the grade decides which road courses the rock may go into.

That classification is also a description of the traffic. Rock rated for surface courses moves to paving jobs and batch plants inside a working radius, not across the state, so the trucks that serve the Gibbs Quarry do the same loaded run many times a day.

Those cycles are what wears the equipment. Loading shock, short brake-heavy descents and constant articulation over a pit floor put hours and stress into a chassis that a highway mile never touches, and the odometer records none of it.

It also means the fleet turns over on contract dates rather than on mileage. When a paving season ends, or a batch plant changes hands, trucks come up for sale in Bell County that are mechanically fine and simply surplus.

Those loads meet a weight rule that is short to state and easy to get backwards.

The ceiling is the plain federal one: 80,000 lb gross, 20,000 lb on a single axle, 34,000 lb on a tandem. Texas grants no commodity variance of the kind Georgia and Kentucky write for named cargo.

The general permit adds ten per cent on the axle and five per cent on gross, with registration to 80,000 lb and a fifteen-thousand-dollar bond. What comes with it is liability: the permit holder answers for actual damage to load-restricted roads and bridges. Pennsylvania allocates road cost the same way, through a bond per linear mile and an excess-maintenance agreement; Ohio instead puts a signposting duty on the mine operator. Texas and Pennsylvania both put the road on the carrier.

And the two percentages run against each other. On a load-zoned road the permitted weight drops ten per cent below the maximum, so the permit’s five per cent on gross and the zone’s ten per cent reduction are not to be added.

Tex. Transp. Code § 621.101; Chapter 623 permits. Information, not legal advice.

Beyond the weight rule, the paperwork is where Texas differs most from its neighbours.

We need a title unless the truck is old enough that it never had one. A lost title has a counter replacement, and where none exists there is a bonded route; neither stops a sale.

Texas brands salvage only where repair cost exceeds the actual cash value immediately before the damage, and actual cash value means market value — effectively a hundred per cent, against seventy-five in six states, seventy in Arkansas and sixty in Oklahoma. It is the highest bar recorded on file, and unlike the percentage states it carries a second condition: the damage must involve a major component part.

The separate nonrepairable class has five routes into it, including one — sold for export only — that appears in no other state on file. New Mexico is the only other state with such a class, and there a single test defines it.

Tex. Transp. Code § 501.091. Information, not legal advice, and only as current as the date the rule file was last verified.

All of that equipment is equipment we buy. Dump trucks and aggregate haulers off the Gibbs Quarry work. Flatbeds, day cabs and road tractors, mixers, rollbacks, box trucks, straight trucks, service bodies, and the work trucks and pickups that go with a crew.

Bell County sits on the Interstate 35 corridor between Austin and Waco, which gives a seller here a deep general truck market rather than one tied to a single pit.

Whatever you drive, the offer doesn’t change. We buy all of them.

• 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 only ever ran short pit cycles.Then the hours matter more than the miles, and we’d rather know them. It does not change whether we buy 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. The Gibbs Quarry roads and the rest of Bell County run the same pattern.

Beyond a paving contract ending, the reasons are personal ones. Retiring. A medical that went the wrong way. A truck bought for one job that outlived the job.

Yards around the Gibbs Quarry and across Bell County usually have one waiting.

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.