We buy trucks in Stockdale

The operation here is the Ecleto Creek Mine: nine employees, operator of record Manley Brothers of Texas, carried by MSHA as a surface operation working industrial sand. That commodity string is the tell. This is Eagle Ford in-basin frac sand.

In-basin is the entire point. Proppant once came from Wisconsin and Minnesota by rail across half a continent, and the industry answered by moving the mines next to the wells. Sand out of Wilson County goes into Eagle Ford completions a short truck run away and never sees a railcar.

Nine people is a small operation feeding a large district, which is the normal shape out here rather than an exception.

Because the Ecleto Creek load starts close to the well, the truck does the whole job, and there are three ways to do it. Sealed sand boxes ride a standard flatbed and get forklift-swapped in ten to fifteen minutes. Pneumatic tankers blow the load into wellsite silos. Belly dumps drop it.

What they share is the waiting. Wellsite queuing puts hours on an engine that the odometer never records, and that is a property of proppant delivery rather than of any one basin.

Proppant is chosen for hardness and crush resistance, so a tank that carried sand has had a different life from one that carried cement. You know better than we do what that does over a few years. The Ecleto Creek Mine is a Manley Brothers operation and the wells it feeds are a short run off.

Those loads run under one statutory ceiling, and sand is conspicuously absent from the relief.

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.

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, 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.

All of that equipment is equipment we buy. Pneumatic tankers and belly dumps off the Ecleto Creek work. Flatbeds that ran 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.

San Antonio sits 30 miles or so from the core of this district, which gives a seller here something a Permian seller does not have: a deep general truck market that does not rise and fall with drilling alone.

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.
• My tanker hauled frac sand, not cement.Then it has worked harder, and we’d like to know the history. It does not change whether we buy it.
• The hours are high and the miles are low.That is the normal shape of a wellsite truck out of Manley Brothers country and it is not a problem. Tell us the hours.
• 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. Manley Brothers country and the rest of Wilson County run the same pattern.

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 Ecleto Creek Mine and down toward the Eagle Ford counties 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.