We buy trucks in Hoquiam

Three operations are attached to Hoquiam in the node list. One is a liquid bulk terminal at the Port of Grays Harbor — and here the record does something you should know about, because that port is entered twice.

The two entries sit about 370 feet apart. One is filed here by the address on the row; the other is filed to Aberdeen, next door, by nearest centroid. The two towns face each other across the river and the port straddles the ground between them, so both filings are defensible and neither is called wrong. What it means in practice is that a page about either town is describing the same working harbour from a different side of it.

The other two are rail yards under the Puget Sound & Pacific Railroad, at 1.19 miles and 1.20 miles from the centroid — one site written down twice, on the same short line that carries every rail row in this corner.

Liquid bulk means tankers, and a tanker is its own discipline: the trailer carries a certification history as well as a service history, and the pump and the plumbing wear to a schedule the driveline knows nothing about.

The port and rail-yard sidecars under docs/facts/node/; the node list at docs/nodes/node-list.json. Distances are straight-line to the place centroid, not drives.

Whatever comes off that harbour, the ceiling on it is a statute question, and the statute does not resolve to 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.

Past 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. Log trucks and timber rigs, chip trucks, tankers and bulk rigs, day cabs and road tractors, flatbeds, rollbacks, service bodies, box trucks and straight trucks, and the work trucks and pickups that go with a crew.

Box trucks and straight trucks are not a Grays Harbor 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 terminal on the water and the yards 1.19 miles inland 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 tanker and the test has lapsed. Is that a dealbreaker?No. Tell us the specification and when it was last tested and we’ll take it from there — a lapsed certification is something we need to know, not a reason to walk away.
• Do you come out to Grays Harbor County?Yes, all of it and both sides of the river with it — the yards 1.20 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 woods contract that finished. A truck parked behind a shop since somebody stopped driving it, costing insurance every month it does not turn a wheel.

Across Grays Harbor County it is the same trucks for the same reasons, whether they loaded at the terminal or ran past the yards 1.19 miles inland.

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.