We buy trucks in Teague

The rail yard here is operated by BNSF Railway and its coordinate lies 0.47 miles from the centre of town, inside the place. Across the twenty-five yards in this lane only one sits closer to the town it is named for.

Under half a mile is close enough that the yard and the town are not really separable. A place like this in Freestone County was laid out around the railroad rather than beside it, and the street pattern still shows it.

What moves through the yard was not determined from any source read for this research. It is the only rail-yard row attached here, and the record carries the distance and the operator and nothing more.

That 0.47 miles is the whole working radius for a truck serving this yard, and it is the kind of running that ruins an odometer as evidence. Signals, tight corners, constant stopping, and a full load for all of it.

Those conditions put the wear in the clutch, the cooling system and the brakes, and they put almost nothing on the mileage. A Freestone County day cab showing very little use has quite possibly done a great deal of it, and the hours are the number worth asking for.

It also means the equipment is local. Nobody commutes to a yard half a mile from the middle of a small town, so the trucks belong to people in it and are sold by the people who drove them.

Those loads meet a weight rule that is short to state and easy to get backwards.

The ceiling is the plain federal one: 80,000 lb gross, 20,000 lb on a single axle, 34,000 lb on a tandem. Texas grants no commodity variance of the kind Georgia and Kentucky write for named cargo.

The general permit adds ten per cent on the axle and five per cent on gross, with registration to 80,000 lb and a fifteen-thousand-dollar bond. What comes with it is liability: the permit holder answers for actual damage to load-restricted roads and bridges. Pennsylvania allocates road cost the same way, through a bond per linear mile and an excess-maintenance agreement; Ohio instead puts a signposting duty on the mine operator. Texas and Pennsylvania both put the road on the carrier.

And the two percentages run against each other. On a load-zoned road the permitted weight drops ten per cent below the maximum, so the permit’s five per cent on gross and the zone’s ten per cent reduction are not to be added.

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 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. Farm trucks and grain hauls, flatbeds, dump trucks, rollbacks, box trucks, straight trucks, service bodies, and the pickups that go with a crew.

Freestone County sits on the corridor between the metroplex and the coast, so a seller 0.47 miles from a working yard has more than one direction to send a truck.

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 mileage is almost nothing for the age.That is what a 0.47 miles working radius does to an odometer, and it is not a problem. Tell us the hours if the truck records them.
• 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. Freestone County is easy country to collect from.

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 within the 0.47 miles between the town centre and the Freestone County 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.