We buy trucks in Burlington

Three operations are attached to Burlington in the node list. The Belleville pit works construction sand and gravel with 12 employees, which is a substantial crew for a pit and means steady tandem work rather than the occasional load.

The other two are rail yards under BNSF Railway, and they are as close to the middle of town as anything in this lane gets: 0.07 miles and 0.10 miles from the centroid, 0.13 miles apart from each other. That is one site filed as two rows, and it is the ordinary co-located pair rather than anything odd.

Gravel and rail inside a few hundred yards of each other makes for short hauls and a lot of turns. Trucks here put hours on faster than they put miles on, and you know better than we do what that does to one over a few years.

MSHA Mine Data Retrieval System; the rail-yard sidecars under docs/facts/node/. Distances are straight-line to the place centroid, not drives.

Those two rows are the honest pair. A third one carrying the same name is filed under Spokane, 234.6 miles from both, and it is a different facility that happens to share a place name.

It is on this page because an earlier scan got it backwards — it recorded the Yard row as the Spokane one and called the pair non-co-located, and both halves of that were wrong. The correction is in the record and this page follows the correction rather than the first reading.

None of it changes what we buy or where we come out to. It is here because a page quoting distances to a hundredth of a mile owes you the rows it does not trust.

That pit and that yard both answer to one statute, and 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.

Beyond 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. 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 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 pit and the yards 0.07 miles from the middle of 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 is a tandem dump that only ever ran local. Is that a problem?The opposite, usually. Give us the hours as well as the miles — a truck that did short hauls out of one pit has a different history from one that did the same miles on a highway, and the hours are where it shows.
• Do you come out to Skagit County?Yes, all of it and the towns around it — the pit and the yards 0.10 miles from the centre 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 job that finished and did not get replaced. 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, most of them working within 0.13 miles of a rail yard and a few minutes of a pit.

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.