We buy trucks in Refugio

The rail yard attached here is operated by Union Pacific, and its coordinate lies 1.34 miles out, attached by the nearest-centroid fallback rather than by sitting inside the place. It is the only rail-yard row attached to this town.

The record carries the town’s name with a three-letter suffix after it. What that suffix denotes was not established by this research, and rather than offer a plausible expansion of it, this page notes that yard naming in the source data is the railroad’s own and is not documented anywhere that was read.

What moves through the yard was not determined either. So the record amounts to a railroad, 1.34 miles, and two things nobody wrote down — which is a smaller set of facts than most of these pages carry, and is stated at that size rather than inflated.

That is still worth describing. A Union Pacific yard 1.34 miles outside a small coastal-bend town is reached on county roads, and the trucks that serve it are based across a wide rural area rather than in the town itself.

Those trucks put real road mileage on before they earn anything, and then spend the other end of the day waiting. Hours at idle and low-gear manoeuvring at a gate age a driveline in a way the odometer never shows, and that much holds at every yard in this lane.

It also means ownership is dispersed and personal. Most calls from around a yard like this one come from the person who drives the truck, and that makes for a short conversation.

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

This is coastal-bend country within reach of the ports, so a truck 1.34 miles from a Union Pacific yard is straightforward to move.

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.
• I’m out in the country, not in town.So is the yard. The 1.34 miles between the two is the normal shape here and it makes no difference to us.
• 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 buy it remotely and arrange the tow, come to you and drive it away, come and tow it, or you can drive it to us. The Union Pacific ground out there changes nothing about that.

Beyond a 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 along the 1.34 miles between the town and the Union Pacific tracks usually have one parked up.

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.