We buy trucks in Bothell

One operation is attached to Bothell in the node list: Iron Mountain Quarry, working crushed traprock with 18 employees. That is the biggest quarry crew anywhere in this lane, and traprock is hard rock — heavy for its bulk, loaded into open-topped tandems and tri-axles, and the kind of material that finds the limit of a road before it finds the limit of a truck.

It is also 32.72 miles from the middle of this town. The row is filed here by the address on its mine registration rather than by position, which is how 42 of the 43 rows in that dataset sitting more than fifteen miles from their city got there.

The county field survives what the city field does not: the federal geocoder returns the same county the list names, so the county cross-check passes and only the city fails. That is the honest limit of the check rather than a defect in it — a Washington county is big enough to absorb a thirty-mile error and a town is not.

MSHA Mine Data Retrieval System; docs/nodes/FINDING-city-resolution.md section 1e on source-city assignment. The distance is straight-line to the place centroid, not a drive.

Those are that quarry’s roads rather than this town’s, and we would rather say so than borrow a circle. Within ten miles of the gate the federal inventory records 24 structures, 6 posted for load and 6 coded below legal loads — 25.0%, the most restricted circle of its batch — and the nearest is 1.78 miles out.

Every one of the six is county-maintained. Not one is the state’s and not one is a city’s, which is Washington’s ordinary arrangement in its purest form: statewide the county and state tiers are almost the same size, 40.3% against 39.8%, but a county bridge is coded below legal loads at 15.6% and a state bridge at 2.1%. Snohomish County maintains 176 bridges and posts 17.

The tightest rates 18.8 metric tonnes, about 20.7 US tons, and carries the Mountain Loop Highway 6.55 miles from the gate. Over the 11.0-tonne tare of an empty tandem dump that admits roughly 7.8 tonnes of traprock — a part load, every trip, on a haul where a quarter of the crossings are restricted.

Read it as an upper bound. It is a minimum inside a ten-mile circle, and at 64.1% of nodes measured this way something tighter lies between ten miles and twenty.

FHWA National Bridge Inventory 2025, Washington file, items 41, 64 and 70; docs/nodes/FINDING-radius-sensitivity.md for the radius figure.

Those crossings bind that quarry. The statute binds everything, and it does not resolve to one 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 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. Dump trucks and aggregate haulers, day cabs and road tractors, flatbeds, rollbacks, service bodies, mixers, box trucks and straight trucks, and the work trucks and pickups that go with a crew.

Box trucks and straight trucks are not a Snohomish 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 ones working the quarry 32.72 miles out and the many more that never go near it.

• 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 has spent years going part-loaded over posted bridges. Does that show?It shows as low miles against high hours, and we read it that way rather than as a truck that has been standing. Give us both numbers.
• Do you come out to Snohomish County?Yes, all of it and the towns around it — the quarry 32.72 miles out included, whatever address its registration carries. 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 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 Snohomish County it is the same trucks for the same reasons, whether they hauled traprock 32.72 miles from here or worked in town all their lives.

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.