We buy trucks in Bremerton

Three operations are attached to Bremerton in the node list and they belong to three different worlds. Kitsap Quarry works crushed traprock with 2 employees, 1.09 miles from the town centroid. A National Guard installation sits 1.89 miles out. And a rail yard 2.99 miles out is carried under the United States Government as its own carrier.

That last one is a naval shipyard on the evidence of its name, and what it handles was not determined. It is one of sixteen federal rows across twelve states in its batch, which is rare enough that the record itself remarks on it.

Kitsap County is also where the naval base is decomposed into four separate labels across the node list — Bangor, Keyport, the Bremerton row and this Guard site — at least four of them one command under different names. That is a fact about the file, not about the roads.

For trucks it comes to this: hard rock going out in tandems on one side of town, and base and shipyard work on the other. Two different jobs on the same short network.

MSHA Mine Data Retrieval System; the node list at docs/nodes/node-list.json. Distances are straight-line to the place centroid, not drives.

Those two jobs share a network the federal inventory has measured, and it is a clean one. Within ten miles of the quarry it records 90 structures, 2 posted for load and 3 coded below legal loads, the nearest 3.90 miles out.

None of them is the county’s. Kitsap County maintains 41 bridges and posts none of them at all, so the restrictions here belong to the state — the reverse of the ordinary Washington picture, where a county bridge is coded below legal loads at 15.6% against 2.1% for a state one.

The tightest is odder still. It rates 21.8 metric tonnes, about 24.0 US tons, carries the SR 304 bus transit facility 3.91 miles from the gate, and is maintained by a toll authority — a maintenance tier that turns up almost nowhere else as the thing setting a commercial floor. Over the 11.0-tonne tare of an empty tandem dump it admits about 10.8 tonnes of stone.

As everywhere, read that as an upper bound: it is the minimum inside a ten-mile circle, and at 64.1% of nodes measured this way a tighter crossing 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 two posted structures are a light touch. The statute is the heavier constraint, 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 rules on them, 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, flatbeds and day cabs, road tractors, 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 Kitsap 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 quarry 1.09 miles out and the base and shipyard roads across 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 was a contractor truck working on the base. Anything different about that?Not for us. Bring whatever paperwork came with it and we’ll take it from there — the title is the part that matters, and a decal on the door is not.
• Do you come out to Kitsap County?Yes, all of it and the towns around it — the quarry 1.09 miles out included, and the crossing 3.91 miles the other way. 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 on the base that finished. A truck parked behind a shop since somebody stopped driving it, costing insurance every month it does not turn a wheel.

Across Kitsap County it is the same trucks for the same reasons, whether they hauled rock off the pit 1.09 miles out or worked the shipyard roads.

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.