Bailey County
No hard rock up here, and the pits reflect it
The seventeen High Plains counties in this research carry no outcropping hard rock at all. What gets extracted is caliche, river gravel and sand, and the operations are small in proportion.
Two sit here. The Copley Pit records 2 employees and sits 0.23 miles from its active state registration; a crusher row records 5 with its nearest registration 6.5 miles off.
The Copley operator name is the interesting one. Wayne Copley Trucking is a haulage business rather than an aggregates business, so at this scale the pit and the trucking are the same company.
So the truck is the business here, not the pit
That combination is worth understanding before you value anything. When a haulage firm owns the pit, the equipment is the asset and the hole in the ground is a convenience.
It means the trucks are looked after in a way a quarry fleet sometimes is not, because they are what earns. It also means they get sold as a business decision rather than when they finally fail.
A flour mill also sits in Bailey County under Grain Craft, and grain work is its own pattern — hopper bottoms and seasonal peaks rather than steady year-round hauling. The Copley Pit sits 0.23 miles from its registration and works the other half of the year.
Texas weight law
One ceiling, and a permit list that skips stone
Caliche, gravel or grain, it all runs under one statutory 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.
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 base haulers off the Copley Pit and the crusher row. Grain hauls and hopper bottoms off the mill work. Day cabs and road tractors, flatbeds, rollbacks, box trucks, straight trucks, service bodies, and the work trucks and pickups that go with a crew.
Bailey County is a long way from anywhere, so buying remotely and arranging the tow is a normal way to do this rather than a fallback.
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 Muleshoe
- Do you really come out this far?We do, and often we don’t need to. A lot of High Plains trucks are bought remotely and towed. We can also come to you and drive it away or tow it, or you can drive it to us.
- 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 is a farm truck rather than a fleet truck.We buy those too. Across Bailey County most of them are, and the offer does not depend on what the truck did for a living.
- It has been parked in a field a long while.Common up here and not a disqualifier. Tell us how long and whether anything came off it.
- 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.
Why people call
Beyond a season ending, the reasons are personal ones. Retiring. A medical that went the wrong way. A truck left when somebody stopped driving it and nobody wanting to be the one to scrap it.
Places around the Copley Pit and across Bailey 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.