Parker County
A quarry owned by a builder, not a quarry company
One crushed-stone operation attaches here — the Grindstone, 25 employees — and the interesting thing about it is who runs it. The operator is Kiewit Mining Group, a national heavy-civil contractor rather than an aggregates business.
That is a fourth ownership model. Most pits are merchant quarries selling to whoever turns up, or they are owned by a ready-mix company feeding its own plants. This one belongs to the outfit that builds the road.
It changes who the trucks work for. A contractor-owned pit largely feeds its own jobs, so the haul pattern follows a construction programme rather than a market.
That ownership also decides a question the county line raises
Those pit trucks cross a boundary that matters on paper. The operation itself is in Palo Pinto County while the row attaches to Weatherford in Parker County, and Parker is one of the seventeen Texas emissions counties while Palo Pinto is not.
For most of the trucks on this page it makes no practical difference: the state does not require diesel vehicles to be emissions-inspected. It is worth knowing all the same, because it is the kind of line that catches people out when a truck changes hands.
What it does mean is that a Weatherford truck is often registered one side of a boundary and worked on the other, which is ordinary here.
Texas weight law
One ceiling, and a permit list that skips stone
Those loaded runs sit under one statutory ceiling, and stone is not on the relief list.
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
All of that iron is iron we buy. Dump trucks and aggregate haulers off the Grindstone work. Lowboys and the tractors that move plant between jobs. Day cabs, flatbeds, rollbacks, box trucks, straight trucks, service bodies, and the work trucks and pickups that go with a crew.
Contractor fleets turn equipment over on a schedule, so Kiewit Mining Group country produces a steady supply of trucks that are sound and simply surplus.
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. Kiewit Mining Group runs the pit and the operation itself sits in Palo Pinto County.
Straight answers
The questions we get asked in Weatherford
- 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.
- Does the emissions county thing affect selling it?Diesel vehicles are not required to be emissions-inspected in Texas, so for most trucks it does not. Worth knowing about all the same.
- It came out of a contractor fleet.Kiewit Mining Group equipment is usually well maintained and we are glad to see it. Tell us the service history if you have 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. Kiewit Mining Group works the pit while the row attaches into Parker County.
Why people call
Beyond a construction programme finishing, the reasons are personal ones. Retiring. A medical that went the wrong way. A truck bought for one job that outlived the job.
Yards around the Palo Pinto County 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. Parker County yards and the Palo Pinto County line usually have one waiting.