Sell your semi truck for cash in Chesapeake the easy and convenient way

Chesapeake covers something like 350 square miles. That one fact explains most of what looks odd about the place on paper.

Four rail yards sit inside the city limits and every one of them is between 8.11 and 9.72 miles from the centre of it: South Branch, Portlock and Caroline under Norfolk Southern, and Berkley under the Norfolk and Portsmouth Belt Line Railroad Company. In most towns a facility nine miles from the middle is in the next town. Here it is downtown’s neighbour.

The heavy industrial anchor is the cement plant, seventy-two people on the books, operator of record Imerys Norfolk, carried under MSHA identity 4405046. A French industrial-minerals group running a cement operation at a tidewater site is not what most people picture when they think of Hampton Roads freight, and it is the largest headcount recorded at any working site here — though most of the other rows filed to this city carry no headcount at all, which is not the same as carrying a small one.

That same size is what makes the national data unreliable about Chesapeake. Seven military rows are filed here. At least four of them are components of Norfolk Naval Shipyard — which is in Portsmouth, not in Norfolk and not here. Their coordinates land between 8.5 and about 10 miles from where they are filed, in a different independent city each time.

None of that is anyone being careless. Virginia has 38 independent cities that are constitutionally part of no county, they are large, and they sit against each other, so a coordinate near a boundary has several big places to choose from. A distance test that works in Ohio has nothing to grip on here.

The practical version, for a seller: we are not going to tell you what the industry round you looks like by counting rows in a file. We will ask you where the truck is and what it has been doing. That is a shorter conversation and it has the advantage of being true.

Those sites move gravel, sand, asphalt and crushed stone, and Virginia has a permit written for exactly that. Va. Code § 46.2-1143 covers vehicles used exclusively for hauling them, and it goes a long way further than the ordinary limits: 60,000 lb on three axles, 70,000 on four, 90,000 on five and 110,000 lb on six, for a seventy-dollar permit fee. Against a normal ceiling of 80,000 lb that is a different job.

It carries two hard limits. No more than fifty miles from origin to destination, and nothing in it extends the interstate limits at § 46.2-1127 by so much as a pound.

Then the catch, which is the real point. The permit exists only in counties that impose a severance tax on gases or a severance licence tax on coal producers — and the statute that authorises those taxes is permissive, so a locality may levy one or may not. There is no statutory list of qualifying counties anywhere. Whether this one qualifies was not established. In practice Virginia’s severance taxes sit in the southwest coalfield, and the expectation is that this permit reaches nothing on tidewater — but an expectation is not the same thing as having checked, and we are not going to dress it up as one.

The commodity permit at Va. Code § 46.2-1143, with the ordinary limits at § 46.2-1122 and the tandem at § 46.2-1127. Information, not legal advice.

That rule is the short version, and everything after it is a fix. A lost title has a counter replacement. Where none exists there is a bonded route. Neither one stops a sale.

Virginia’s branding chapter has a limb people miss. Under § 46.2-1600 a late model vehicle is nonrepairable where the estimated repair cost exceeds ninety per cent of its actual cash value before the damage. But it is also nonrepairable where it is simply damaged, inoperable and of no use except as parts and scrap — a test with no percentage in it at all.

Which matters because a percentage feels like something you can argue with and a judgement does not. A truck that would never come back onto the road can land in that second limb without any arithmetic being done. If somebody has told you a figure decides it, that is only two thirds of the section.

Va. Code § 46.2-1600. Information, not legal advice, and only as current as the day it was read.

Both of those rules apply to trucks we are happy to buy. Mixers and dump trucks off the Imerys Norfolk cement work and the aggregate that goes with it. Day cabs and road tractors off the terminal runs and the South Branch yard. Flatbeds, rollbacks, box trucks and straight trucks out of the trades. Service bodies, work trucks and pickups off crews. Tankers when they come up.

Whatever you drive, the offer doesn’t change. We buy all of them.

Because the city is wide, say where the truck actually is rather than what the address says. We come to you and drive it away, we come to you and tow it, or we buy it remotely and arrange the tow with nobody visiting. You can bring it to us as well if that suits you.

• 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.
• My address says Chesapeake but the yard is nearly in Portsmouth.That is normal here and it changes nothing. Four Norfolk Naval Shipyard rows are filed to this city and the shipyard is in Portsmouth. Give us the location and we work from there.
• How am I paid?Cash or electronic payment. That is the whole list.
• It has been on cement and aggregate work.Then it has had a hard life and we would like the history. Drums, frames and brakes tell the story better than the odometer on that kind of work.
• What about the title?We need one unless the truck is old enough that it never had one. A lost title has a counter replacement; where none exists there is a bonded route.

Those questions come up late. What comes first is usually a reason that has nothing to do with trucks. Retiring. A medical that went the wrong way. A contract that ended. Somebody clearing a yard out towards South Branch or Portlock, 9.72 miles from the middle of a city they still call downtown, that has had the same tandem sitting in the corner of it for two winters, with insurance going out on something that isn’t turning a wheel.

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.