We buy trucks in Lindsay

The only stone operation attached to this town is a four-person outfit trading as TriCounty Materials and Services, and its coordinate sits 8.16 miles from the centre of Lindsay, out in Cooke County.

Four people and eight miles is the whole of it. There is no state aggregate registration recorded against the coordinate, no graded-source entry, no commodity note — the research behind this page found one fact about this operation and did not manufacture a second.

One further row in the central list is attached to this town and is not used on this page. Its coordinate lies in Reeves County, over four hundred miles west, and no reading of the geography puts it near Cooke County. It has been reported rather than written about.

That thinness is itself informative. A four-person operation 8.16 miles outside a small town does not support a haulage fleet, and the trucks in Cooke County are mostly owned by the people who drive them — farm trucks, grain hauls, a dump truck kept for the pit run and the odd job.

Those trucks age differently from fleet equipment. They sit through seasons, run hard for a few weeks, and get maintained by their owner rather than on a schedule. Long idle periods are harder on seals, batteries and brake systems than steady work is, and that is worth mentioning when you call.

It also means most sales here are one truck at a time, from the person who owns it. That suits us. There is no fleet manager to go through and no reason for the process to take long.

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 what a truck weighs, what it is called on paper is the other thing worth settling early.

We need a title unless the truck never had one. Lost titles have a counter replacement and there is a bonded route where no title exists, so this is a step rather than an obstacle.

The salvage test is a comparison: repair cost, including parts and labour, against the vehicle’s actual cash value immediately before the damage. What Texas leaves out of that repair cost is unusual. Repainting comes out, and so does sales tax on the total. Missouri excludes airbags, tires, sound systems and hail damage; Kentucky excludes airbag reinstallation; Texas is the only state on file to exclude paintwork.

For a truck whose damage is mostly cosmetic, taking the paint out of the numerator moves the answer a long way from the brand.

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. Farm trucks and grain hauls, dump trucks and aggregate haulers off the TriCounty Materials work, flatbeds, day cabs and road tractors, rollbacks, box trucks, straight trucks, service bodies, and the pickups that go with a crew.

Cooke County sits close enough to the north Texas markets that moving a truck out of here is straightforward, however far out the farm is. The 8.16 miles to the pit ground is the short end of any journey a truck makes from here.

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 has sat for a couple of seasons.That is common on a Cooke County place and it is not a disqualifier. Tell us how long it sat and we’ll 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 buy it remotely and arrange the tow, come to you and drive it away, come and tow it, or you can drive it to us. The 8.16 miles out to the pit ground makes no difference to any of that.

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

Places around the 8.16 miles of Cooke County road out to the pit ground usually have one behind the barn.

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.