We buy trucks in Ellensburg

Four operations are attached to Ellensburg in the node list and every one of them is sand, gravel or crushed stone. Ronald Sand & Gravel works crushed stone with 2 employees, 2.68 miles from the town centroid. Plant 1, Portable Unit #1 and the Ellensburg Pit each run 2 on construction sand and gravel.

Two of those are portable by name, which is a real distinction rather than a label. A portable plant moves to the material, so the haul out of it changes with the job, and the trucks doing it are the same tandems and tri-axles working a different set of roads each season.

Eight people across four gates. This is small-operator country, and the equipment that comes up for sale here belongs to people who own one or two trucks rather than a fleet.

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 changing hauls run over the most restricted network in this lane. Within ten miles of the crushed-stone pit the federal bridge inventory records 126 structures, 15 posted for load and 14 coded below legal loads — and the nearest of them is 0.49 miles out. Not a crossing you plan around. A crossing you meet leaving the gate.

Eleven of the fourteen are county-maintained, one is the state’s and two are the city’s, which is the ordinary Washington arrangement at its sharpest. Statewide the county and state tiers are near enough 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%. Here that ratio shows up as eleven against one.

The tightest rates 17.8 metric tonnes, about 19.6 US tons, and it carries South Thorp Highway 0.49 miles from the pit. Over the 11.0-tonne tare of an empty tandem dump that admits roughly 6.8 tonnes of stone — the smallest allowance at any node in this lane, and the reason a truck here can look underworked on paper while its hours say otherwise.

And that is an upper bound, not the worst of it. The figure is a minimum inside a ten-mile circle, and at 64.1% of nodes measured this way a tighter crossing sits 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 postings are the binding limit most days. The statute behind them is the other half, 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.

Beyond 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 Kittitas 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 four pits and the posted crossings 0.49 miles from the nearest gate 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 one truck, not a fleet. Is that too small to bother with?No. Around here one or two trucks to an owner is the normal case, not the small end of it, and a single truck gets the same look as twenty would.
• Do you come out to Kittitas County?Yes, all of it and the towns around it — the four pits included, and the county roads carrying fourteen restrictions, the nearest 0.49 miles from a gate. 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 Kittitas County it is the same trucks for the same reasons, most of them worked out of a pit inside 2.68 miles of town.

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.