Smith County
One yard, and we will not pretend to more
What the research holds for Tyler is a single rail yard: operator Union Pacific, 3.05 miles from the centre of town, and the only rail-yard row attached to the city anywhere in the node list.
What that yard handles could not be established from any source read. So this page does not say. An unknown commodity is an unknown commodity, and guessing at one is the easiest way to put something false in front of somebody selling a truck.
The coordinate itself carries a caveat worth stating: rail-yard locations in this data are the mean of a track polyline rather than a surveyed point, so 3.05 miles is a good indication and not a survey.
So what we can say here is about the state, not the town
Beyond that one yard, the facts that bear on a truck in Smith County are Texas facts, and they govern a truck here exactly as they do one in Houston.
That is not nothing. The weight ceiling, the permit list and the salvage test are what decide whether a load was legal and whether a damaged truck can be sold on a clean title, and they are worth knowing wherever you are parked.
Where a page has nothing local and true to add, it should say so and move to what it does know. This one does.
Texas weight law
One ceiling, and a permit list that skips stone
Those state rules start with a single ceiling on weight.
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
None of that narrows what we will look at. Day cabs and road tractors, dump trucks and aggregate haulers, flatbeds, rollbacks, box trucks, straight trucks, tankers, service bodies, and the work trucks and pickups that go with a crew.
Box trucks and straight trucks are not a Smith County thing in particular — they are everywhere. They are on the list because we buy them here too.
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. Union Pacific yard work and the rest of Smith County produce most of it.
Straight answers
The questions we get asked in Tyler
- 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 is a farm truck rather than a fleet truck.We buy those too, the same as anything off the Union Pacific yard. The offer does not depend on what the truck did for a living.
- 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 Union Pacific yard 3.05 miles out is the only one recorded here.
Why people call
Those reasons are much the same everywhere and they are mostly personal. Retiring. A medical that went the wrong way. A truck just sitting, and every month it sits is another month of insurance on something that is not turning a wheel.
Places around the Union Pacific yard and out across Smith County 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.