We buy trucks in Poteet

The operation here is Signal Peak Silica, and it reports 99 employees to the federal mine register. That is the largest mine headcount in this lane by a wide margin — more than the next five put together — and every other pit on these pages is counted in single or low double figures.

The register describes it as a surface operation working sand. That description is technically true and practically misleading: this is a frac sand operation, and the operator names say so where the commodity string does not. Searching the whole node list for the words that would identify it returns nothing at all — the type strings simply do not carry them.

That is the third time in this research a type string has understated what a node actually is. It is worth knowing when reading any of these pages: an entry that looks minor may be a plant employing a hundred people, and the label is not the evidence.

Those 99 jobs sit in a specific basin, and confusing it with the other one is the commonest mistake made about sand in this state. This is the Eagle Ford. Atascosa County lies about 35 miles south of San Antonio, a genuine metropolitan market on the doorstep, where the far western sand districts have Midland at sixty miles and nothing else beyond it.

That difference is not geographic trivia, it is why the local truck market behaves differently. Drilling activity out around Winkler County, where new entrants committed over eight hundred and fifty million dollars to opening mines, does not set the pace here. Treating sand in this state as one market would be wrong in both directions.

The practical upshot for a seller is a deeper and steadier market than a remote basin offers. A truck in Atascosa County has a metropolitan buyer within an hour whether or not the sand work is busy.

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.

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.

All of that equipment is equipment we buy. Pneumatic tankers and belly dumps off the Signal Peak Silica work, flatbeds that carried sealed boxes, day cabs and road tractors, dump trucks, rollbacks, box trucks, straight trucks, service bodies, and the work trucks and pickups that go with a crew.

Three body styles do the same job in this county and we buy all three. The nearby Palo Alto Sand ground and the other Atascosa County pits run the same mix.

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.
• The hours are way ahead of the miles.That is the defining shape of a sand truck and it is not a problem. Wellsite queuing puts hours on an engine the odometer never records, so around the Signal Peak Silica ground the mileage is close to meaningless. Tell us the hours.
• My tank hauled sand, not cement.Then it has worked harder. Proppant is chosen for hardness and crush resistance, and the qualities that hold a fracture open are the qualities that wear a blower, the product lines and the aeration pads. It does not change whether we buy it, but we’ll ask about those parts.
• 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. Atascosa County is 35 miles from a city and easy to collect from.

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

Yards around the Signal Peak Silica ground and out across Atascosa 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.