We buy trucks in Midlothian

This is the hub of the North Texas cement industry and the numbers say so. Three separate cement production facilities work here: one recording 274 employees under Continental Cement, one recording 151, and Ash Grove Cement Company recording 124. A steel mill sits alongside them.

Capacities are attributed rather than asserted as current. The largest of the three is described as producing more than 2 million tonnes a year with about 150 people; the Ash Grove plant is described at roughly 900,000 metric tons.

One operator string is worth a caution. The research checked it because it looked wrong, and found that in this dataset the operator field tracks ownership changes within months while the plant name lags. A name is a plant; an operator is a company that may have bought it recently.

Three plants of that size in one place is not local demand. They sit about twenty-five to thirty miles from the Dallas–Fort Worth market and ship into it.

What leaves is two different loads on two different trucks. Bulk cement goes out in pneumatic tankers to concrete plants; ready-mixed concrete goes out in mixers to a pour. Only the mixer gets an axle allowance under the state permit list, so two trucks on the same road out of Ellis County are under different rules.

It is also, for a tanker, an easier life than the alternative. A pneumatic that spent its years on cement here has had a gentler time than one that ran frac sand out in the basin, because proppant is chosen for hardness and cement is not.

Beyond that one allowance, everything here runs under the ordinary 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, 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.

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.

All of that iron is iron we buy. Pneumatic and bulk tankers off the Ash Grove Cement Company and Continental Cement gates. Mixers off the ready-mix side. Dump trucks and aggregate haulers off the quarries, day cabs and road tractors, flatbeds, rollbacks, box trucks, straight trucks, service bodies, and the work trucks and pickups that go with a crew.

Three plants and a steel mill inside Ellis County turn over a great deal of equipment on schedules that do not coincide.

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.
• My tanker carried cement, not sand.Then it has had an easier life than a basin proppant tank. Ash Grove Cement Company and Continental Cement work both produce them and we buy either.
• The drum is worn out on my mixer.A worn drum is not a missing component and does not make a truck incomplete.
• 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 plant fleet turning over, the reasons are personal ones. Retiring. A medical that went the wrong way. A truck bought for a pour schedule that no longer exists.

Yards around the Ash Grove Cement Company plant and across Ellis 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.