A plant named for another town
The plant is named for one town and filed under another
The stone operation attached to this county seat is the Gordon Plant, seven people on the federal mine roll. The name is not this town’s: Gordon is a separate community on the interstate about fifteen miles south, and the record attaches to the county seat to the north because that is where a page exists.
That is worth stating rather than hiding, because it changes what the entry means. A reader who assumed the plant sits at the edge of this town would be wrong by roughly fifteen miles of county road, which is a real distance when somebody is arranging to move a truck.
A second graded source sits in the same county. The state highway department’s rated-source catalogue for bituminous work lists Victory Rock under producer code 0218207 at Surface Aggregate Classification B, with an abrasion figure of 29 on the Los Angeles test and a magnesium sulfate soundness figure of 21. Two stone operations, one county, and neither of them quite where the town name suggests.
So the haul here is a county-road haul, and it is longer than it looks
Those fifteen miles are the trucking. Stone moving off the Gordon Plant toward the county seat and out to jobs runs on two-lane county roads rather than on the interstate for most of the leg, and county roads are built for lighter traffic than loaded aggregate.
That kind of running puts wear in predictable places: brakes and rear ends on the grades, suspension on the surface, and very little of it on the odometer. A dump truck working between here and the Victory Rock ground has usually done more than its mileage says.
It also means equipment is sold on job timing. When a paving contract in this county ends, sound trucks come up together rather than one at a time.
Texas weight law
The plain federal figures, and what a permit does and does not lift
Those loads run to figures that are worth knowing before a sale rather than after one.
Texas sets gross at 80,000 lb, a single axle at 20,000 lb and a tandem at 34,000 lb. Those are the plain federal numbers, and Texas adds no commodity variance to them.
A permit moves the axles rather than the gross. Under the state’s size and weight schedule a permitted single axle rises to 25,000 lb and a permitted tandem to 46,000 lb, while ready-mixed concrete trucks run 23,000 and 46,000 with no permit at all. Whether a permit also lifts the gross was not established, and this page does not state that it does.
The permit layer is written by named industry — ready-mixed concrete, fluid milk, timber, super heavy single-trip — and there is no permit named for aggregate, stone, sand or quarry products.
Tex. Transp. Code § 621.101; Texas Department of Motor Vehicles size and weight limits. Information, not legal advice.
Texas paperwork
We need a title — unless it never had one
Beyond the weight and the permit, 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 rather than pure arithmetic: there must also be damage to, or a missing, major component part.
The calculation also 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 equipment is equipment we buy. Dump trucks and aggregate haulers off the Gordon Plant work. Flatbeds, day cabs and road tractors, mixers, rollbacks, box trucks, straight trucks, service bodies, and the work trucks and pickups that go with a crew.
This is open country west of the metroplex, so a truck around the Victory Rock and Gordon Plant ground is within a straightforward run of a deep market.
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 Palo Pinto
- 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 plant on my paperwork is in a different town.That is the normal confusion around the Gordon Plant, which is named for one community and filed against another. It makes no difference to the sale.
- 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 fifteen miles between the Gordon Plant and the Victory Rock ground is nothing to arrange.
Why people call
Beyond a paving 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.
Yards between the county seat and the Gordon Plant, and out toward the Victory Rock ground, 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.