We buy trucks in Birch Bay

Three operations are attached to Birch Bay in the node list, and one of them is the largest oil refinery in the state. BP Cherry Point is the biggest in Washington by crude distillation capacity and the third biggest on the US West Coast, ahead of Puget Sound, Marathon Anacortes, Ferndale and U.S. Oil. Its capacity is reported variously at about 225,000, approximately 250,000 and 251,000 barrels per day after expansion, and those figures are not reconciled — so we give the range the sources give rather than pick one.

A refinery gate is tanker country. It is also engine-off-and-wait country, where hours accumulate at a loading rack, and where a trailer’s certification history is as much of the sale as its running gear.

The other two are BNSF Railway rail yards, 3.78 miles and 3.81 miles out, attached to this place by nearest-centroid fallback rather than by anything the record itself says.

And the refinery row is misfiled twice over. Its name field reads a misspelling of Bellingham — a different, real city with a page of its own — while the plant is actually near Blaine, and geometry resolved it to a third place, here. The row sits 0.51 miles from the refinery, which is close enough that the row is the refinery.

The liquid-bulk-terminal 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.

A loaded tanker meets the same ceiling as everything else, and the statute setting it 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 what a truck may carry, 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 Whatcom 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 refinery gate and the two yards 3.81 miles inland 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. Is the trailer part of the deal?Tell us the specification and the last test date and we’ll take it from there. On a liquid bulk unit the certification history matters as much as the driveline does, and a lapsed test is not a dealbreaker — it is just something we need to know.
• Do you come out to Whatcom County?Yes, all of it and the towns around it — the refinery gate and the yards 3.78 miles inland 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 Whatcom County it is the same trucks for the same reasons, whether they loaded at the refinery or ran past the yards 3.81 miles inland.

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.