We buy trucks in Pasadena

This town carries more nodes than anywhere else in this lane — eight of them, all in Harris County — and the shape of that list is the story. Five are liquid bulk terminals: Kinder Morgan, Magellan Midstream Partners, Alpha Technical Services, Quality Transload and a refiner’s own terminal.

The other three are a marine terminal handling wheeled cargo at Bayport, the Bayport Container Terminal with its own intermodal rail ramp, and a joint reserve base — Ellington Field — whose coordinate sits 2.93 miles out and inside the place.

What the reserve base does, how much ground it covers and how many people work there were not established by this research and are recorded as not established. The terminals are a different matter: five tank farms in one town is a fact about the roads whatever any one of them is storing.

Those five terminals set the pattern. Liquid bulk work means tankers and vacuum trucks running short repeated legs between racks, plants and yards, with long waits at gates in between, while the container terminal puts day cabs on the same roads doing the same short dense turns with boxes.

Both are hard on a truck in the way that does not show. Hours at idle, constant low-gear manoeuvring, hard braking and tight turns age a clutch, a cooling system and a set of rear ends far faster than the mileage suggests. A Harris County tanker off the Kinder Morgan racks with modest miles has usually worked hard for them.

It also means fleets turn over on contract dates. When a terminal contract moves between operators, several sound trucks reach the market at once, which is why so many calls from this part of the county are about a group rather than a single truck.

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. Tankers off the Kinder Morgan and Magellan Midstream Partners kind of work. Day cabs and road tractors off the Bayport Container Terminal runs, flatbeds, dump trucks, rollbacks, box trucks, straight trucks, car haulers, service bodies, and the work trucks and pickups that go with a crew.

Harris County is the deepest truck market in the country, so a seller here has options rather than a single buyer.

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 hauled product, not freight.Then it has had a different life and we want the history. Around the Harris County tank farms that is the normal shape and it does not change whether we buy it.
• It is one of several.Then tell us about all of them. Around the Bayport Container Terminal a contract ending usually means more than one truck, and we’d rather look at the group.
• 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 2.93 miles out to Ellington Field is nothing to arrange.

Beyond a terminal contract moving, the reasons are personal ones. Retiring. A medical that went the wrong way. An owner-operator who has had enough of the gate queue.

Yards between the Kinder Morgan racks and the Bayport Container Terminal gates 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.