We buy trucks in Aberdeen

The Port of Grays Harbor moved 3.3 million metric tons of cargo in 2025, its third-best year by tonnage, over four deep-water terminals, and it took a record 151 vessel calls to do it — 41 barges and 110 ships. New records went to soymeal, wood chip exports and auto imports.

Those three tell you most of what runs here. Wood chips are walking-floor and chip trailers off the woods; soymeal is bulk; auto imports are car haulers off a berth. Add the log trucks that feed a chip pile and that is four kinds of truck on one harbour.

The rail is a single short line. All four yards filed here carry the Puget Sound & Pacific Railroad, and two of them sit almost on top of the town at 0.49 miles and 0.51 miles, with the port yard 1.65 miles out and a berth-specific dock row at 1.53 miles.

The port also appears twice in the record, in two different layers, with coordinates about 370 feet apart and filed to two different cities — here and to Hoquiam, across the river. Both are arguably right and no verdict is offered.

The port and rail-yard sidecars under docs/facts/node/; the node list at docs/nodes/node-list.json. Distances are straight-line to the place centroid, not drives.

That doubling is the smaller of the two filing problems on this page. A crushed-stone registration is also filed under this city, running 3 employees, and its coordinate sits 35.52 miles from the town centroid — in Mason County, not this one.

It is filed by source-city, which is the address written on the mine registration rather than a measured position, and 42 of the 43 rows in that slice sitting more than fifteen miles from their city come from exactly that. The county field is the part that fails here: the registration says Grays Harbor and the coordinate returns Mason.

So the bridge picture around that node is not this town’s. For the record it is a thin one: Mason County maintains 58 bridges and posts two, and one of those two — Ewbank Road, rated 18.1 metric tonnes, about 20.0 US tons — caps that registration and one other from 9.93 miles away. This county is a different matter: Grays Harbor maintains 189 bridges and posts 15.

FHWA National Bridge Inventory 2025, Washington file; docs/nodes/FINDING-city-resolution.md section 1e on source-city assignment.

Those postings are one limit. The statute is the other, and it does not resolve to a single figure.

Washington’s maximum gross is 105,500 lb. The statute bars more than 20,000 lb on any single axle, and lets two consecutive sets of tandem axles carry 34,000 lb each where the first and last axle sit 36 feet or more apart, with the groups in between governed by the bridge formula.

Then it opens up again. The department of transportation by rule for state highways, and a local authority for a road under its own jurisdiction, may extend that table to 115,000 lb. So the operative figure is an administrative rule or a local ordinance rather than anything printed in the code, and no page can honestly hand you one number. Whether the 105,500 survives on the interstate is not established by the files behind this page, and we are not going to guess at it.

Seasonal limits work the same way, and Washington writes down something most states leave implied. A local authority may restrict a road that rain, snow or thaw would seriously damage — and the ordinance is not effective unless and until the signs are up and being maintained. The sign is the rule. Which roads are posted in a given week is not in any file we hold.

RCW 46.44.041 on axle loads and the extension to 115,000 lb, and RCW 46.44.080 on local seasonal restrictions. Information, not legal advice.

Past the roads and the loads, the paperwork is that one sentence.

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 of those stops a sale.

One Washington duty has a clock on it where most states’ have none, and it is the one to know about if a truck has been written off. Where a vehicle is destroyed or declared a total loss, the owner — or the insurer, once it has settled — has fifteen days to report it to the department and surrender the title. The statute names the fifteen days itself, which is unusual.

RCW 46.12.600. Information, not legal advice.

None of that narrows what we will look at. Log trucks and timber rigs, flatbeds and day cabs, dump trucks and aggregate haulers, car haulers, road tractors, rollbacks, service bodies, box trucks and straight trucks, and the work trucks and pickups that go with a crew.

Box trucks and straight trucks are not a Grays Harbor County thing in particular — they are everywhere. They are on the list because we buy them here too.

Whatever you drive, the offer doesn’t change. We buy all of them. The four berths and the yards 0.49 miles from the middle of town are where most of them turn up.

• 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 engine is out of it. Is that different?Yes, and that is the line. A tired engine is fine; an engine that has been pulled out and sold means we can’t buy the truck.
• 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. If it was ever declared a total loss, the fifteen-day reporting duty is the department’s, not a bar on selling it.
• It is a chip truck with a walking floor. Does the trailer matter?Tell us what the floor is and roughly how it has been run and we’ll take it from there. On a chip unit the floor and the drive take as much of the conversation as the engine does.
• Do you come out to Grays Harbor County?Yes, all of it and the towns around it — the yards 0.49 miles in and the port yard 1.65 miles out included. We come to you and drive it away, we come to you and tow it, we buy it remotely and arrange the tow, or you drive it to us.

Those questions come up because the reasons for selling are mostly personal. Retiring. A medical that went the wrong way. A woods contract that finished. A truck parked behind a shop since somebody stopped driving it, costing insurance every month it does not turn a wheel.

Across Grays Harbor County it is the same trucks for the same reasons, whether they ran to the berths or to the yards 1.65 miles out.

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.