We buy trucks in Lampasas

The mine record attached to this town is not a place. It is a registration for a portable crushing spread — a machine — carrying five people, and its coordinate marks where that spread was registered rather than a pit anybody drives to. It is the twentieth row of that kind identified across twelve states in this research, so it is a pattern rather than an oddity.

What sits behind it is a real quarry with a state grade. The highway department’s rated-source catalogue for bituminous work lists the Allen Keller Company at the Molesworth Quarry, producer code 0713409, at Surface Aggregate Classification B, with an abrasion figure of 31 on the Los Angeles test and a magnesium sulfate soundness figure of 25.

That pairing is the usual one. An operator holds a fixed rated source for the graded material and runs a portable spread for the work that does not need it — and only the spread got registered against this town.

That distinction is the useful one for a seller. Equipment tied to a portable spread does not run a fixed route out of a gate; it moves to where the crushing is, sits while the spread is set up, then hauls hard for the length of a job.

Those cycles are uneven, and they age a truck unevenly too. Long idle periods are harder on seals, batteries and brake systems than steady running is, and a chassis jacked around a temporary setup carries stress the odometer never sees — a different history from a truck that ran the Molesworth Quarry gate every day.

It also means the sale timing is job timing. When a spread finishes and the next contract does not follow, sound trucks come up quickly, and an Allen Keller Company job ending has that effect on the equipment around it.

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 and the permit, 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 rather than pure arithmetic: there must also be damage to, or a missing, major component part.

The calculation also 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.

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

The Allen Keller Company ground sits within reach of the central corridor, so a seller here has more than one direction to move a truck in.

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.
• It sat for a season between jobs.That is normal for equipment tied to a portable spread rather than to the Molesworth Quarry gate, and it does not count against the truck. Tell us how long and we will ask about the right things.
• 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 Allen Keller Company roads and the rest of the county run the same pattern.

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

Yards around the Allen Keller Company work and out toward the Molesworth Quarry 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.