We buy trucks in Tiki Island

This is a small place with a large neighbour, and the records show it plainly. Two rail yards are attached to this town and both have coordinates inside Galveston city — 4.41 miles and 6.19 miles from the centre here — and both attach by nearest-centroid fallback rather than because any source named the town.

The port row does the same thing at 6.41 miles, and Galveston holds a city page of its own. So the honest description of the local record is that it belongs to the city across the water and landed here by arithmetic.

A military reserve row carries the same disagreement: named for Galveston, labelled for this town. It is one of four such name-and-city disagreements found in a single research batch.

Those fallback attachments are worth taking at face value rather than dressing up. A community of this size does not generate its own freight.

What it sits in the middle of does. Galveston County runs port work, causeway traffic and the coastal service trades, and a truck parked here almost certainly earns its living somewhere else in the county.

One row is under Union Pacific and one under the other national carrier, 4.41 and 6.19 miles out, and either is a plausible place for a local truck to have spent its week.

Whatever the truck did, it ran under one statutory ceiling.

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 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.

None of that narrows what we will look at. Day cabs and road tractors off the port and yard work. Tankers, flatbeds, dump trucks, rollbacks, box trucks, straight trucks, service bodies, and the work trucks and pickups that go with a crew.

Because the working yards are 4.41 and 6.19 miles off across Galveston County, a truck here is often stored rather than based, and that suits buying it remotely and arranging the tow.

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 is stored here but it worked in Galveston.That is the normal shape around here and it changes nothing. Union Pacific yard work 6.19 miles off is still local.
• It has sat since the last storm season.Common on the coast and not a disqualifier. Tell us how long and whether anything came off it.
• 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.

Beyond a contract ending, the reasons are personal ones. Retiring. A medical that went the wrong way. A truck that stopped earning and has been parked at the house since.

Places across Galveston County and out along the Union Pacific 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.