Burnet County
A granite dome, and a lime plant beside it
Granite Mountain sits about two miles northwest of town. It covers roughly 180 acres and rises 969 feet, and it has been quarried since the late nineteenth century.
Three operations work under this town today. Delta Materials records 18 employees, the Marble Falls Quarry 17, and the Fairland Plant and its quarries 9. Cactus Canyon Quarries, established here in 1966, supplies architectural and precast crushed marble and granite.
There is a lime plant here too. Federal survey records list five operating lime plants in the state, and this is one of them — a different product from crushed stone and a different kind of truck at the gate.
So three products leave the same few miles of road
Those operations are close together and they ship genuinely different things, which is unusual for a place this size.
Road aggregate goes out in dump trucks. Architectural and precast stone goes out on flatbeds, strapped and protected, because a chipped block is a scrapped block. Lime goes out in bulk tankers.
One record note worth stating: the Fairland row shares its exact coordinate with another operation in the node list, which means the location is doing duty for two businesses rather than pinpointing one. Cactus Canyon Quarries and the 969 feet of Granite Mountain are the fixed points here.
Texas weight law
One ceiling, and a permit list that skips stone
All three products run under one statutory ceiling, and none of them is on the relief list.
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, and each one is 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 stone 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, and it comes with a bond and liability for actual damage to load-restricted roads. 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.
Texas paperwork
We need a title — unless it never had one
Beyond the weight rules, 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, not pure arithmetic: there must also be damage to, or a missing, major component part.
The statute lists thirteen major component parts, and the calculation 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.
What we buy here
All of that iron is iron we buy. Dump trucks and aggregate haulers off the Marble Falls Quarry. Flatbeds off Cactus Canyon Quarries and the architectural stone side. Bulk tankers off the lime plant, day cabs and road tractors, rollbacks, box trucks, straight trucks, service bodies, and the work trucks and pickups that go with a crew.
Delta Materials ground and the 180 acres of Granite Mountain have kept equipment busy here for well over a century.
Whatever you drive, the offer doesn’t change. We buy all of them.
We buy complete trucks. If the engine, transmission, doors, rear ends, drive shafts, wheels or anything under the hood have been removed, we can’t buy it. Small things — a missing bumper — are fine.
Straight answers
The questions we get asked in Marble Falls
- 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 deck is chewed up from stone loads.Decking is a repair, not a disqualifier. Cactus Canyon Quarries flatbeds all look like that eventually.
- My tanker carried lime.Fine. Tell us what it carried and whether it has been cleaned, and we will take it from there.
- 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.
Why people call
Beyond a quarry contract ending, the reasons are personal ones. Retiring. A medical that went the wrong way. A truck sitting behind a shed since somebody stopped driving it.
Yards below Granite Mountain and around the Fairland Plant usually have one waiting, and 969 feet of rock above the town is not going anywhere.
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.