We buy trucks in Laredo

Two rail-yard rows attach to this city, and both are recorded with operator Kansas City Southern. One is carried as LAREDO and the other as SOUTH LAREDO.

Their coordinates sit 1.59 miles apart, and both are recorded at 4.10 miles from the city centroid — the same rounded distance, which two points on the same arc can honestly both have.

The reason the number is soft is in how it was made. Each of those coordinates is the mean of the vertices of a track polyline, not a surveyed facility point. Every one of the 2,459 rail-yard rows in the list is derived the same way, and the service radius carried alongside them is a constant applied across the whole set and flagged as estimated.

What the yards actually handle could not be determined from any source read for either one. That is an absence, not a zero, and we are not going to dress it up as one.

That matters more to a driver than it does to a map.

Both Kansas City Southern rows sit 1.59 miles apart, and a yard has a length. Averaging its track into one dot puts the dot somewhere in the middle, which can be a mile or more from the gate you were actually told to use. Anyone who has been sent to the centre of a yard and then driven the fence line looking for the way in already knows this; the record simply cannot express it.

The town carries more than the two yards. The node list holds an intermodal ramp here as well, and three construction-sand and common-sand pits under separate operators. So the local truck population is a mix: drayage tractors working short legs and long waits, and pit trucks working the aggregate side.

Short legs with long waits are the pattern worth naming, because it is the one that makes hours and miles disagree on a truck that is otherwise sound.

Both halves of that truck population run under the same 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. It does not grant a commodity variance the way Georgia and Kentucky do.

It grants permits instead, each 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 pit 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, with registration to 80,000 lb, a fifteen thousand dollar bond, and the permit holder answerable 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 against each other and must not be added.

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

Beyond the weight rules, the paperwork is where this city differs from the rest of the state.

Start with the ordinary part. 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 then brands a truck salvage only where the cost of repairs exceeds its actual cash value immediately before the damage — effectively the whole value, with no percentage in the test, and with repainting and sales tax left out of the repair figure. It is also a two-part test: there must be damage to, or a missing, major component part.

The class below salvage is the one worth knowing here. A nonrepairable motor vehicle in Texas can arrive at that status five separate ways: damaged, wrecked or burned until its only residual value is parts or scrap; entering the state on a comparable out-of-state document; reported by a salvage vehicle dealer; surrendered by its owner for dismantling, scrapping or destruction; or sold for export only. That last route appears in no other state on file, and on a border crossing it is not a hypothetical.

If a truck has already been through any of those doors, say so at the start. It changes what we are buying, not whether we are buying.

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

All of it is iron we buy. Day cabs and yard tractors off the Kansas City Southern ground, road tractors for the longer legs, dump trucks and aggregate haulers off the sand pits.

Then the rest of what a yard holds: flatbeds, lowboys, rollbacks, box trucks, straight trucks, service bodies, and the work trucks and pickups that go with a crew.

Two yards 1.59 miles apart, an intermodal ramp and three pits put a lot of equipment inside one county line.

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.
• The hours are high and the miles are low.That is the shape of drayage work around the Kansas City Southern yards and across Webb County: short legs, long waits, and hours the odometer never records. Give us both numbers and we read them together.
• It is registered out of state, or it was going for export.Say it at the start rather than the end. It is a question about paperwork, and paperwork questions are cheaper to answer early.
• 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.

Beyond a lane drying up, the reasons are personal ones. Retiring. A medical that went the wrong way. A truck bought for one job that outlived it.

Yards along the Kansas City Southern line and across Webb 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.