We buy trucks in Slaton

Three rows attach here and they are not the same kind of thing. The rail yard, operated by BNSF Railway, lies 0.96 miles from the centre of town, inside the place, and it is the only rail-yard row attached here.

The other two are sand and gravel. One is a Martin Marietta plant carrying this town’s name while sitting over in Crosby County; the other, Damron Sand, is recorded in Lubbock County alongside the yard.

So the town’s industry is filed across a county line, with the bigger name on the far side of it. That is worth knowing before anybody reads too much into which county an entry says, and it is the ordinary condition on the high plains, where a section road runs straight through a boundary without noticing it.

Those three rows describe three kinds of hauling in one small place, and around here one truck often does all of them. A run to the yard 0.96 miles away, a season on the Martin Marietta sand, and harvest work in between.

That mixture is the thing to describe when you call. A machine that alternates between short town legs, loaded sand hauls and seasonal farm running has worn in three patterns, and the odometer averages them into a single unhelpful number.

It also means equipment here is owned by people rather than by fleets, and comes up for sale on the owner’s timing. Lubbock County work does not follow one contract calendar, so trucks appear year round.

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 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. End dumps and bulk trailers off the Martin Marietta sand, farm trucks and grain hauls, flatbeds, dump trucks, rollbacks, box trucks, straight trucks, service bodies, and the pickups that go with a crew.

Lubbock County is the market centre for the whole southern plains, so a seller 0.96 miles from a working yard is inside a real market.

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 does two or three different jobs.That is the normal history in Lubbock County and it is not a problem. Tell us roughly how the time splits.
• The bed is worn from sand.That is abrasion and it is expected off the Martin Marietta ground. We’ll ask about the liner, the tailgate seal and the hoist pivot.
• 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 0.96 miles into town changes nothing.

Beyond a season ending, the reasons are personal ones. Retiring. A medical that went the wrong way. A truck bought for one job that outlived the job.

Places around the 0.96 miles between town and the yard, and out across Lubbock County, usually have one behind the shop.

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.