North Texas
Three yards, and two of them are one shortline’s
Three rail yards sit inside this city, at 1.90, 2.07 and 2.22 miles from the centre. All three are genuinely inside the place rather than attached by fallback, which is less common than it sounds.
One runs under a national carrier. The other two belong to a local shortline, the Wichita, Tillman and Jackson Railway, which is a regional operator rather than a Class I.
Those two shortline rows are the same name twice: one is the other with the railroad’s own reporting mark prefixed. Same yard family, two records, and it is worth knowing before anybody counts them as separate destinations.
So a shortline town works differently from a Class I town
That ownership split matters more than it looks. A shortline interchanges with the big railroads rather than running long trains of its own.
It means the trucking is local distribution: short legs between the yards, warehouses and the industrial parts of town, with a lot of dropping and hooking rather than line-haul.
A day cab that spent years running between rows 1.90 miles and 2.22 miles out can be thoroughly used up at a mileage a highway truck would call nothing, and the hours are the honest number. The Jackson Railway rows are where most of that happens.
Texas weight law
One ceiling, and a permit list that skips stone
Short legs or long, it all runs 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.
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. Day cabs and yard tractors off the shortline traffic. Box trucks and straight trucks off the distribution side. Flatbeds, dump trucks, rollbacks, tankers, service bodies, and the work trucks and pickups that go with a crew.
Three yards inside 2.22 miles of the middle of town keeps a steady flow of equipment turning over in Wichita County.
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.
Straight answers
The questions we get asked in Wichita Falls
- 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.Normal for local work between three yards inside 2.22 miles. Not a problem — tell us the hours.
- It ran for the shortline rather than a big fleet.No difference to us. The Tillman and Jackson operation produces trucks we buy like anywhere else.
- 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.
Why people call
Beyond a contract ending, the reasons are personal ones. Retiring. A medical that went the wrong way. One tractor too many after a lease finished.
Yards across Wichita County usually have one waiting, from the Jackson Railway rows 1.90 miles out to the national carrier row at 2.22.
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.