We buy trucks in Wilmer

Three rows attach here. The rail yard is an intermodal terminal operated by Union Pacific, and its coordinate lies 1.56 miles from the centre of town — inside the place, not merely nearest to it. A container ramp is recorded alongside it, and a sand and gravel pit sits in the same county.

The inside-the-place part is what separates this from the other metropolitan terminal in this lane, which is attached to its town by the weaker nearest-centroid fallback. Here the terminal genuinely is in the town, even though it carries the city’s name rather than the town’s.

What moves through it was not determined from any source read for this research. For a container terminal that matters less than it would elsewhere: a box terminal handles boxes, and the road pattern is the fact rather than the cargo.

That siting explains everything about the local equipment. A terminal 1.56 miles inside a small town, surrounded by distribution buildings, produces tractors that work a radius of a few miles and spend the rest of the day waiting at gates.

It is the hardest duty cycle for a driveline and the easiest one to misread. Idle hours, low-gear manoeuvring and constant hard braking do the damage; the odometer records almost none of it. A Dallas County day cab with modest mileage has usually earned a great deal more wear than the figure suggests.

It also means turnover is contractual rather than mechanical. A drayage contract moving between operators puts sound tractors on the market in groups, and the Post Oak sand ground nearby adds end dumps to the same local pool.

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 what a truck weighs, what it is called on paper is the other thing worth settling early.

We need a title unless the truck never had one. Lost titles have a counter replacement and there is a bonded route where no title exists, so this is a step rather than an obstacle.

The salvage test is a comparison: repair cost, including parts and labour, against the vehicle’s actual cash value immediately before the damage. What Texas leaves out of that repair cost is unusual. Repainting comes out, and so does sales tax on the total. Missouri excludes airbags, tires, sound systems and hail damage; Kentucky excludes airbag reinstallation; Texas is the only state on file to exclude paintwork.

For a truck whose damage is mostly cosmetic, taking the paint out of the numerator moves the answer a long way from the brand.

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 off the Post Oak sand ground, flatbeds, dump trucks, rollbacks, box trucks, straight trucks, car haulers, service bodies, and the work trucks and pickups that go with a crew.

Dallas County is one of the two deepest truck markets in the state, so a seller 1.56 miles from an intermodal terminal is about as well placed as a seller gets.

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 Dallas 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 1.56 miles across town 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 within the 1.56 miles between the town centre and the Dallas County 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.