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

Two things sit side by side on the west edge of this city and neither is what most people picture as industry.

The first is the Craney Island Fuel Terminal, the Navy’s largest fuel facility in the United States, with about 1,100 acres of above- and below-ground storage. The second is the Craney Island Dredged Material Management Area next door: roughly 2,500 acres of manmade peninsula, built out of what came off the bottom of the harbour channels, run by the Corps of Engineers in three cells — one always being pumped into while the other two dry out.

That second one is quietly the more important of the pair. Somewhere for the dredged material to go is why the channels stay deep, and the channels staying deep is why the Port of Virginia can take the ships it takes. A pile of mud is load-bearing infrastructure for a container port.

What we cannot tell you is how much of that turns into road freight. Throughput, truck counts and whether fuel leaves this site by road in any real volume were never established. It is easy to look at a fuel farm and start talking about tank trailers, and that would be us guessing rather than us knowing.

That habit of things not being what they look like runs right through this city, and it starts with the best known name on the waterfront. Norfolk Naval Shipyard is in Portsmouth. Not in Norfolk. It has carried that name a long time and it is still not where the name says.

It carries on from there. The CSX yard 2.78 miles from the middle of town is called Chesapeake, which is a different independent city next door. The Norfolk Southern yard at Lamberts Point is filed to this city and its coordinate is inside Norfolk, where Lamberts Point actually is. A naval facility labelled Portsmouth resolves to Suffolk, four miles out. Of the Hampton Roads rows checked across three passes, the naval medical centre is the one that lands in the city its own name carries.

There is one piece of this that shows up in a truck rather than on a map. A shipyard fleet works a closed site in a marine industrial atmosphere — welding fume, blasting grit and paint overspray, on top of salt. That combination leaves a contamination ordinary washing does not lift. On a used shipyard trailer the deck, the tie-downs, the frame and the corrosion are the sale, and the odometer describes almost nothing about it.

Those trucks run under three plain numbers. Va. Code § 46.2-1122 puts a single axle at 20,000 lb and gross at 80,000 lb, and § 46.2-1127 puts a tandem at 34,000 lb. Virginia’s interstate limits match its highway limits, so there is no step down when you get on the big road.

The threshold that catches people in a port city is a registration one rather than a weight one. Apportioned registration under the International Registration Plan starts at 26,000 lb where a vehicle operates in two or more jurisdictions — and out of here, two jurisdictions is a normal Tuesday.

It matters when you sell because it decides what paperwork exists to hand over. A truck that has been running apportioned has a registration history that says where it has been; one that never crossed a line does not. Neither is better. They are just different piles of paper, and knowing which you have saves a conversation.

Gross and single axle at Va. Code § 46.2-1122, the tandem at § 46.2-1127, and the apportioned-registration threshold as recorded for Virginia. Information, not legal advice.

Beyond registration that is the whole rule, and everything after it is a fix rather than a category. A lost title has a counter replacement. Where none exists there is a bonded route. Neither one stops a sale.

Virginia is unusually specific about what does not count in the repair figure its branding tests turn on. Towing is out. Storage is out. A temporary replacement or rental vehicle is out. So is any payment for diminished value.

Those last two are the interesting ones, because no other state on file names them. Storage in particular can run up faster than the repair on a truck that sat at a yard for months while somebody argued, and in Virginia none of it counts toward the threshold. It is a small piece of statutory tidiness that happens to land in the seller’s favour on exactly the situation that produces long delays.

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

Both sorts of paperwork sit behind trucks we buy. Tankers and day cabs off the Craney Island fuel work and the Lamberts Point end of the river. Dump trucks and aggregate haulers off the dredge cells and the construction that follows them. Flatbeds, rollbacks, box trucks and straight trucks out of the trades. Service bodies, work trucks and pickups off crews.

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

On getting it collected: 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. If the truck is inside a controlled site — and around Craney Island some are — that last one is usually the least trouble for everybody. You can also drive it to us.

• 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 came off yard work and it is filthy.Blasting grit, overspray and salt are what we expect on this waterfront. Tell us what it worked in. It does not change whether we buy it.
• My registration says Norfolk but I’m in Portsmouth.Half the waterfront is in that position and it changes nothing about the sale. Give us the location of the truck and we work from there.
• Do you come out past the city?Yes. Craney Island, the Lamberts Point end, and over into Suffolk. Distance has never stopped a sale.
• How am I paid?Cash or electronic payment. That is the whole list.
• 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 are the questions. The reason underneath is usually plainer. Retiring. A medical that went the wrong way. A contract that finished. A trailer that came off a closed site and has been standing behind a fence near Craney Island ever since, 2.78 miles from the CSX yard, 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.