King County
One yard, filed here, sitting somewhere else
One operation is attached to Boulevard Park in the node list: a rail yard under BNSF Railway, 1.33 miles from the centroid, placed here by nearest-centroid fallback. Its coordinate lies inside Seattle city, which carries a page of its own.
That is the ordinary shape of a small census place on the edge of a big one. This place is simply the nearest centroid to a coordinate well inside the larger city, so the row lands here rather than where it sits.
There is a second row of the same name 2.91 miles away, filed under Seattle and running under Union Pacific against this one’s BNSF Railway. Two rows, one name, two carriers, and nothing on file says whether that is one facility or two. It is not asserted either way.
What either handles could not be determined from any source read for the batch. What it means for trucks is straightforward: this is close-in drayage country, short legs and many turns, hours going on faster than miles.
The rail-yard 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.
Washington weight law
There is no single number, and the statute is why
Whatever is going out on those short legs, the ceiling is a statute question, and the statute gives no 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.
Washington paperwork
We need a title — unless it never had one
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.
What we buy here
None of that narrows what we will look at. Day cabs and road tractors, box trucks and straight trucks, dump trucks and aggregate haulers, flatbeds, tankers, rollbacks, service bodies, and the work trucks and pickups that go with a crew.
Box trucks and straight trucks are not a King 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 — including the ones this page has no dataset for, which around a yard 1.33 miles out is most of them.
We buy complete trucks. If the engine, transmission, doors, rear ends, drive shafts, wheels or anything under the hood have been removed, we can’t buy it. Small things — a missing bumper — are fine.
Straight answers
The questions we get asked in Boulevard Park
- 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.
- My address says one place and the work was in another. Is that a complication?No — and as this page shows, the records do it too. We need the title; where the truck was working is not part of that.
- Do you come out to King County?Yes, all of it and the towns around it — the yard 1.33 miles out included, wherever the record decides it lives. 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.
Why people call
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 parked behind a shop since somebody stopped driving it, costing insurance every month it does not turn a wheel.
Around King County it is the same trucks for the same reasons, most of them turning at a yard 2.91 miles from another one carrying the same name.
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.