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

Most places we write about are shaped by weight. This one is shaped by cargo class.

Naval Weapons Station Yorktown is the primary ordnance receipt, storage, segregation, issuance and loading facility for the Atlantic Fleet and joint commands. Two miles away sits a fuel depot, putting tank traffic on the same York County roads. Between them, the freight moving through this county is regulated for what it is long before anyone weighs it.

That changes the equipment and it changes the paperwork. Ordnance moves under placard, on routed roads, with parking restrictions, and the vehicles that carry it are inspected on a schedule that has nothing to do with mileage. A truck with a compliance history is carrying documentation an ordinary tandem never accumulates — and that is a thing to have in front of you when you sell it, not left in a folder in the office.

That fuel depot has a civilian counterpart on the river, and it is the clearest example we have found of a record ageing badly. The national list carries the same site twice, 0.77 miles apart: once correctly, as a liquid bulk terminal under Plains All American, and once as a mineral plant with the word Refinery in its name and sulphur as its commodity.

The second one is the stale copy. The refinery has been idle since September 2010. Ownership passed from Western Refining to Plains Marketing in December 2011, the surplus equipment was disassembled and sold, and the site now runs as a rail and water oil terminal with storage for about 6.6 million barrels of crude, products and LPG. It is a substantial operation. It is not a refinery, and has not been one since 2010.

We mention it because the same thing happens to trucks. A description that was accurate when somebody wrote it down gets copied forward until it is describing something that no longer exists. When you tell us what your truck is, tell us what it is now.

That is not the only record here with a date problem, and the second one belongs on this page because of how we handled it. The published descriptions of the weapons station give two different sizes: about eighteen square miles along the York River, and 108.5 square miles said to be roughly a fifth of York County.

York County is about 105 square miles. A facility of 108.5 cannot be a fifth of it, so the two figures cannot both stand. The eighteen-square-mile figure is the internally consistent one. We are still not going to print it, because the same passage describes the station as straddling Warwick County — and Warwick County stopped existing in 1958, when it consolidated into the city of Newport News.

So that description is at least sixty-eight years old and has been copied forward unchecked ever since, which is exactly the reason not to lean on the number sitting next to it. No acreage claim is made on this page. We would rather tell you we do not know than hand you a figure with a dead county attached to it.

Those cargo rules sit on top of the ordinary ones, which are short. Va. Code § 46.2-1122 puts a single axle at 20,000 lb and gross at 80,000 lb, § 46.2-1127 puts a tandem at 34,000 lb, and Virginia’s interstate limits are the same as its highway limits, so there is no step down on the fast road.

The finer rule is § 46.2-1126, which sets gross by the distance between the first and last axle rather than by one figure, with any fraction of a foot rounded up. Six axles across fifty-one feet is what it takes to reach the full 80,000 lb.

None of that is the binding constraint on a placarded load. Routing, parking and inspection are, and they are federal rather than state. Which is the honest shape of this page: the weight table is the part we can quote, and it is not the part that decided how the truck was used.

Gross and single axle at Va. Code § 46.2-1122, the tandem at § 46.2-1127 and the spacing table at § 46.2-1126. Information, not legal advice.

Beyond the weight table the rule is one sentence 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.

One Virginia provision matters more here than most places, because a tank or an ordnance-rated body can outlive the tractor under it. Under § 46.2-1600 the repair-cost figure that the branding tests turn on excludes towing, storage, a temporary replacement or rental vehicle, and any payment for diminished value.

Storage is the one to notice. Equipment that came off a controlled site and sat somewhere for a year while paperwork moved can run up a storage bill faster than the repair, and in Virginia none of that counts toward the threshold. It is a narrow 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.

All of it, and around York County that leans a particular way. Tankers off the fuel work at Naval Weapons Station Yorktown and the depot beside it. Day cabs and road tractors off the terminal runs. Flatbeds, rollbacks, box trucks and straight trucks out of the trades. Service bodies, work trucks and the pickups that go with a crew.

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

If the truck is inside a controlled site, buying it remotely and arranging the tow is usually the least trouble for everyone — nobody needs signing in and nothing waits on an escort. Otherwise we come to you and drive it away, or come to you and tow it, and you are welcome to bring it to us instead.

• 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 carried placarded loads.Then it has an inspection history that has nothing to do with its mileage, and we would like to see it. That is a document to find before you sell, not after.
• The truck is inside the gate.Tell us who signs people in, at Naval Weapons Station Yorktown or anywhere else in York County. If that is awkward we can buy it remotely and arrange the tow instead, with nobody visiting.
• 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 two access questions come up constantly and neither is the reason for the call. Retiring. A medical that went the wrong way. A contract that finished when a site changed hands. A tank trailer standing two miles from the fuel depot it used to serve, on the same York River road, 0.77 miles from a terminal the record still calls a refinery, 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.