We buy trucks in Wylie

The rail yard here is operated by Kansas City Southern and its coordinate lies 1.14 miles from the centre of town, inside the place. An intermodal ramp under the same railroad is recorded alongside it.

That operator is the point of difference. Across the yards in this lane, fifteen belong to one big western system and seven to another; only two are on this third railroad, and this is the one with a container ramp beside it.

What moves through the yard was not determined from any source read for this research. The pairing of a yard and a ramp in one small Collin County town is the fact worth carrying, because it means both carload and container work happen here rather than one or the other.

Those two facilities draw different equipment. A container ramp puts day cabs on short repeated drayage turns; a carload yard puts flatbeds, dump trucks and bulk equipment on longer local runs to and from customers.

Both age a truck in ways the odometer misses, but not equally. Drayage stacks up idle hours and low-gear work within a few miles of the gate; carload work runs further and loads heavier. Knowing which of the two a machine did is the first useful thing a seller can tell us here.

Collin County is the other half of the picture. It is among the fastest-growing counties in the country, so construction equipment turns over here constantly alongside the rail work, and the 1.14 miles between the town centre and the yard runs through the middle of all of it.

Those loads meet a weight rule that is short to state and easy to get backwards.

The ceiling is the plain federal one: 80,000 lb gross, 20,000 lb on a single axle, 34,000 lb on a tandem. Texas grants no commodity variance of the kind Georgia and Kentucky write for named cargo.

The general permit adds ten per cent on the axle and five per cent on gross, with registration to 80,000 lb and a fifteen-thousand-dollar bond. What comes with it is liability: the permit holder answers for actual damage to load-restricted roads and bridges. Pennsylvania allocates road cost the same way, through a bond per linear mile and an excess-maintenance agreement; Ohio instead puts a signposting duty on the mine operator. Texas and Pennsylvania both put the road on the carrier.

And the two percentages run against each other. On a load-zoned road the permitted weight drops ten per cent below the maximum, so the permit’s five per cent on gross and the zone’s ten per cent reduction are not to be added.

Tex. Transp. Code § 621.101; Chapter 623 permits. Information, not legal advice.

Beyond the weight and the permit, 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 rather than pure arithmetic: there must also be damage to, or a missing, major component part.

The calculation also 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.

All of that equipment is equipment we buy. Day cabs and road tractors off the ramp and yard work. Flatbeds, dump trucks and aggregate haulers off the building work, mixers, rollbacks, box trucks, straight trucks, service bodies, and the work trucks and pickups that go with a crew.

Collin County sits inside one of the deepest and busiest markets in the country, so a seller 1.14 miles from a working yard has real options rather than one buyer.

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.
• It ran boxes, not freight on a deck.That is drayage work off the ramp and it is the common history in Collin County. Tell us the hours, which matter more than the mileage on that kind of truck.
• It is one of several.Then tell us about all of them. Around a yard and ramp 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 1.14 miles across town changes nothing.

Beyond a contract moving, the reasons are personal ones. Retiring. A medical that went the wrong way. A truck bought for one job that outlived the job.

Yards within the 1.14 miles between the town centre and the Collin County tracks 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.