We buy trucks in Anacortes

Two operations are attached to Anacortes in the node list and both are the port — a petroleum port row 2.67 miles from the centroid and a principal port row filed by name. What makes the place is not the count of rows but what sits on the point beside it.

Two refineries work there. The Puget Sound Refinery runs 145,000 barrels per day and the Marathon Anacortes refinery 120,000, on ground about 70 miles north of Seattle. Two plants of that size on one headland is a concentration you do not meet often.

That shapes the trucking more than the port row does. A refinery gate is tanker country: engine idling at a loading rack, hours going on while the odometer sits still, and a trailer that carries a certification history as much as a service history. Around it comes everything a plant needs to keep running — flatbeds, service bodies, vacuum and dump work.

The petroleum-port sidecar under docs/facts/node/ and the node list at docs/nodes/node-list.json. The distance is straight-line to the place centroid, not a drive.

Whatever leaves those gates loaded, the ceiling on it is a statute question, and the statute does not settle on a number.

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 load rules, 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. Tankers and bulk rigs, day cabs and road tractors, flatbeds, dump trucks and aggregate haulers, 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 Skagit 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 two refineries and the port 2.67 miles out 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 petroleum tanker and the test has lapsed. Is that a dealbreaker?No. Tell us the specification and when it was last tested and we’ll take it from there — a lapsed certification is something we need to know, not a reason to walk away.
• Do you come out to Skagit County?Yes, all of it and the towns around it — the refineries and the port 2.67 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 rack contract that ended. A truck sitting behind a shop since somebody stopped driving it, costing insurance every month it does not turn a wheel.

Across Skagit County it is the same trucks for the same reasons, whether they loaded at a refinery or worked the port 2.67 miles from the middle of town.

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.