We buy trucks in Von Ormy

The rail facility attached here is an intermodal terminal operated by Union Pacific, and it carries the name of the metropolitan area rather than of this place. Its coordinate lies 2.59 miles away in Bexar County, attached here by the nearest-centroid fallback. A container ramp is recorded alongside it under the same city name.

That gap between the name and the filing is the thing to understand about this page. The terminal is a metropolitan facility; the town that ends up holding it in the list is a small one on the edge of the county, chosen because its centre was nearest.

What moves through it was not determined from any source read for this research. In the case of a container terminal that matters less than usual, because what a box terminal handles is boxes — the road pattern is the fact, not the cargo.

That terminal sets the working day for everything around it. Intermodal work means tractors running short repeated turns between a gate, a yard and a warehouse, rarely further than the 2.59 miles back to this town, and spending a great deal of the day queuing to do it.

It is punishing in the way that never shows on a spec sheet. Idle hours, constant low-gear work, hard braking and tight manoeuvring age a clutch, a cooling system and a set of rear ends far faster than mileage suggests, so a Bexar County day cab with modest miles has usually done real work.

It also means fleets here move together. When a drayage contract shifts operator, several sound tractors reach the market at once, which is why calls from around a terminal like this one are so often about a group rather than one truck.

Those loads run under one statutory ceiling, and stone 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 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. 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 carries 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 the 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 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 terminal work. End dumps, flatbeds, dump trucks, rollbacks, box trucks, straight trucks, service bodies, and the work trucks and pickups that go with a crew.

Bexar County is one of the deepest truck markets in the state, so a seller 2.59 miles from a working intermodal terminal is very well placed.

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 hours are high and the miles are low.That is the normal shape of a Bexar County drayage tractor and it is not a problem. Tell us the hours.
• It is one of several.Then tell us about all of them. Around an intermodal terminal a contract ending usually means more than one truck, and we’d rather look at the group.
• 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 2.59 miles to the terminal changes nothing.

Beyond a drayage contract moving, the reasons are personal ones. Retiring. A medical that went the wrong way. An owner-operator who has had enough of the gate queue.

Yards along the 2.59 miles of Bexar County road between the town and the terminal usually have one sitting.

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.