We buy trucks in Enumclaw

Seven operations are attached to Enumclaw in the node list and every one of them is stone, sand or gravel — the densest cluster of quarry work in this lane. White River Quarry runs 10 employees on crushed stone, 3.36 miles from the centroid. Thunder Mountain Quarry runs 3 on crushed traprock, 1.91 miles out. Ryterra LLC runs 6 on crushed stone, 3.67 miles out.

The other four are sand and gravel: a pit and plant with 12 employees 2 miles out, and three smaller operations, one of them a portable screening plant.

Traprock and crushed stone are not the same load as sand and gravel, and a portable plant is not the same haul as a fixed one — it moves to the material, so the route out of it changes with the job. What that adds up to is a lot of tandems and tri-axles working a small number of roads very hard.

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 roads come down to one crossing, and this is the clearest case of it in the lane. Three separate quarry registrations here all bind on the same structure — a county road called SE Mud Mountain Road — from 4.12, 4.47 and 4.70 miles away.

It rates 15.9 metric tonnes, about 17.5 US tons. Over the 11.0-tonne tare of an empty tandem dump that admits roughly 4.9 tonnes of stone, so all three of those gates load to the same part-load figure whichever way a truck leaves them. King County maintains 142 bridges and posts 9, and one of the nine does this.

One quarry here has a tighter restriction still, rated 10.4 metric tonnes, which is below the 11.0 an empty tandem dump weighs. A commercial truck does not cross it at all, loaded or not, so the rating that actually binds is the next one up.

As always, read the figure as an upper bound: it is a minimum inside a ten-mile circle, and at 64.1% of nodes measured this way something tighter 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.

That is the local ceiling and it is a low one. The statute above it does not resolve to a number either.

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 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. The seven pits, the nearest 1.91 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 has spent years running part-loaded over one bridge. Does that show up badly?It shows up as low miles against high hours, and that is how we read it rather than as a truck that has been standing. Give us both numbers.
• Do you come out to King County?Yes, all of it and the towns around it — the seven pits from 1.91 miles out included, and the county road that caps three of them. 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.

Around King County it is the same trucks for the same reasons, most of them worked out of a pit inside 3.67 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.