We buy trucks in Paris

The rail yard here is operated by the Northeastern Railroad, and that is the fact worth leading with. Almost every yard on this site belongs to one of the large western systems; this one belongs to a shortline, and it is the only shortline yard in this lane.

Its coordinate lies 1.36 miles from the centre of town, inside the place. It is the only rail-yard row attached here.

What moves through it was not determined from any source read for this research. That is a genuine gap rather than a shrug: shortline traffic is exactly the kind that public datasets tend not to carry, and filling it in from what a shortline usually hauls would be inventing the answer.

That ownership shapes the road pattern. A shortline exists to gather local carloads and hand them to a larger railroad, so the trucking around a shortline yard is short-radius collection work in Lamar County rather than long-haul running to a distant terminal.

Those short legs concentrate wear where the odometer cannot see it. A day cab running the 1.36 miles to a yard inside a town spends its life in low gears, on brakes and at idle, and the mileage badly understates the hours.

It also means the customers are local businesses rather than national fleets. Trucks here are usually owned by the people who run them, and they are sold the same way.

Those loads run under one statutory ceiling, and stone is conspicuously absent from the relief.

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 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. 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 carries 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 the 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 rule, the paperwork is where Texas differs most from its neighbours.

We need a title unless the truck is old enough that it never had one. A lost title has a counter replacement, and where none exists there is a bonded route; neither stops a sale.

Texas brands salvage only where repair cost exceeds the actual cash value immediately before the damage, and actual cash value means market value — effectively a hundred per cent, against seventy-five in six states, seventy in Arkansas and sixty in Oklahoma. It is the highest bar recorded on file, and unlike the percentage states it carries a second condition: the damage must involve a major component part.

The separate nonrepairable class has five routes into it, including one — sold for export only — that appears in no other state on file. New Mexico is the only other state with such a class, and there a single test defines it.

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. Day cabs and road tractors off the yard work. Farm trucks and grain hauls, flatbeds, dump trucks, rollbacks, box trucks, straight trucks, service bodies, and the pickups that go with a crew.

Lamar County is the market town for a wide stretch of country, so a seller 1.36 miles from the yard has a real local market as well as our offer.

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 only ever ran local.That is the normal history around a Northeastern Railroad yard and it is not a problem. Tell us the hours if the truck records them.
• 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 1.36 miles across Lamar County town streets makes no difference.

Beyond a local hauling contract going quiet, the reasons are personal ones. Retiring. A medical that went the wrong way. A truck bought for one job that outlived the job.

Yards around the Northeastern Railroad tracks and out across Lamar County usually have one sitting.

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.