We buy trucks in McDade

The installation attached to this town is a National Guard training camp, Camp Swift, and its coordinate lies 2.79 miles away, reverse-geocoding to Bastrop County.

That name and that distance are very nearly the whole record. What the camp does day to day, how much ground it holds and how many people work there were not established by the research behind this page, and were written down as not established rather than filled in.

A guard camp is a particularly easy thing to write confident sentences about, which is the reason for saying this plainly. Training areas run on a schedule nobody publishes, and a page that assumed a volume of trucking would be guessing at the one number a local reader would know was wrong.

That gap does not make the equipment mysterious. Contract and support work around a Bastrop County training area runs on the same machines as contract work anywhere — service bodies, flatbeds, dump trucks and crew pickups — and those are judged on hours, maintenance and completeness.

It also means the questions worth asking are ordinary. What has been replaced, how it has been stored, whether the title is in hand. None of those answers depends on anything about Camp Swift that this research could not establish.

Bastrop County itself is the useful piece of geography. It sits inside the Austin market rather than outside it, so a truck here has somewhere to go.

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. Service bodies and work trucks off contract work. Flatbeds, day cabs and road tractors, dump trucks, rollbacks, box trucks, straight trucks, and the pickups that go with a crew.

Because nothing about the camp’s size was established, we judge a truck here on the truck. Bastrop County work and the 2.79 miles of road out to the gate wear a chassis the same either way.

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 was a contractor truck.That is the common case around Camp Swift and it is fine. Contractor trucks often have better records than fleet ones.
• 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 2.79 miles out to the camp makes no difference.

Beyond a 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.

Places around the 2.79 miles of Bastrop County road out toward Camp Swift usually have one behind the shop.

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.