Grayson County
Three yards, two carriers, and a mill
Three rail yards are filed under Sherman, and the way they are named is the interesting part. Two run under BNSF Railway — one carrying no tag at all and one tagged with the carrier — and the third under the Dallas, Garland and Northeastern Railroad, a shortline.
They sit close in. The untagged row is 1.82 miles from the centre of town, the tagged one 2.25, and the shortline row 1.45.
The other node here is a flour mill run by Ardent Mills, which reverse-geocodes into Grayson County. The research flagged the milling operators as a tier it expected to be thin, and it was: what the mill ships and how much of it were not established, so this page does not say.
So this is a mixed freight town rather than a single-commodity one
Those three yards and a mill do not add up to one industry, which is generally good news for anybody selling a truck here.
It means the local fleet is broad rather than specialised. Bulk work off the mill, general freight off the yards, and the ordinary construction and service traffic of a county seat.
A truck out of a mixed market is usually easier to place than one built around a single customer, and the Ardent Mills traffic alone puts several kinds on the same road. The shortline row sits 1.45 miles out and the Ardent Mills mill adds bulk work on top.
Texas weight law
One ceiling, and a permit list that skips stone
All of that traffic runs under one statutory ceiling, whatever it is carrying.
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 one 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. So 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 comes with 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 those two percentages run in opposite directions and must never be added together.
Tex. Transp. Code § 621.101; Chapter 623 permits. Information, not legal advice.
Texas paperwork
We need a title — unless it never had one
Beyond the weight rules, 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, not pure arithmetic: there must also be damage to, or a missing, major component part.
The statute lists thirteen major component parts, and the calculation 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 iron is iron we buy. Day cabs and road tractors off the yard work. Bulk tankers and hoppers off the Ardent Mills traffic. Flatbeds, dump trucks, rollbacks, box trucks, straight trucks, service bodies, and the work trucks and pickups that go with a crew.
The Dallas, Garland and Northeastern line and the two BNSF Railway rows are where most of it turns up.
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 Sherman
- 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 engine is out of it. Is that different?Yes, and that is the line. A tired engine is fine; an engine that has been pulled out and sold means we can’t buy the truck.
- It hauled grain. Any issue?None. Tell us what it carried and we will take it from there.
- 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. Whichever suits the truck and your week. The Dallas, Garland and Northeastern Railroad and BNSF Railway both work these yards.
Why people call
Beyond a contract that ended, the reasons are personal ones. Retiring. A medical that went the wrong way. One tractor too many in the yard after a lease finished.
Yards around the Dallas, Garland and Northeastern line 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. Grayson County yards and the Ardent Mills traffic usually have one waiting.