We buy trucks in Centralia

Three operations are attached to Centralia in the node list. The largest by crew is a portable sand and gravel plant running 15 employees — the biggest crew at any node in this batch, and a portable one, which means the plant moves to the material and the haul out of it changes with the job.

A rail yard under BNSF Railway sits 1.07 miles from the centroid and is the only rail row attached to this place. What it handles could not be determined from any source read for the batch.

The third is a crushed-stone registration, and it is not here at all.

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

That third row is filed under this city and its coordinate sits 58.35 miles from the centroid — the second largest gap of its kind measured across 1,860 rows. It is assigned by the address on the mine registration rather than by position.

Here the county field fails too. The row is filed to this county, its coordinate returns King, and the road it binds on agrees with the coordinate rather than the filing: a county bridge called SE Mud Mountain Road, rated 15.9 metric tonnes, about 17.5 US tons, 4.46 miles from that gate.

That bridge earns a line of its own. It is the same structure that caps three other quarries, all of them filed under Enumclaw, so one county road sets the loaded weight for four separate registrations — out of the nine bridges King County posts in total. Over the 11.0-tonne tare of an empty tandem dump it admits about 4.9 tonnes of stone.

None of which is this town’s road network. We are publishing the coordinate and naming the distance rather than borrowing a bridge circle from fifty-eight miles away.

FHWA National Bridge Inventory 2025, Washington file, items 41, 64 and 70; docs/nodes/FINDING-city-resolution.md section 1e on source-city assignment.

That is one bridge, and it is not on this town’s roads. The statute is the limit that reaches everywhere, and it 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.

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. 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 Lewis 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 portable plant and the yard 1.07 miles out 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 followed a portable plant around for years. Does that count against it?No, and it explains a lot about a truck. Tell us roughly what it hauled and how far it moved between jobs — a machine that changed sites often has a different history from one that ran a fixed route, and neither is worse.
• Do you come out to Lewis County?Yes, all of it and the towns around it — the yard 1.07 miles out 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 season that did not come back. A truck sitting behind a shop since somebody stopped driving it, costing insurance every month it does not turn a wheel.

Across Lewis County it is the same trucks for the same reasons, most of them working within 1.07 miles of the yard or following a plant that moves.

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.