We buy trucks in Kelso

Five rail yards are filed under Kelso in the node list, packed between 1.20 miles and 1.86 miles of the centroid, and not one of them is named Kelso. Four of the five spell the adjacent city of Longview, in four different ways: two with a carrier tag, one with a junction suffix, and one that splits the name into two words and adds a second suffix. The fifth carries a port authority prefix.

Three of them are BNSF Railway; two run under a short-line mark. What they handle could not be determined from any source read for the batch.

That naming is not a trivia item on a page like this. Five yards two miles apart under four spellings of a neighbour’s name means anyone matching records by name will get the count wrong in both directions — and it is the reason we would rather tell you what we can see than imply we can see more.

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

That is the naming. The geography has a problem of its own. A basalt quarry running 9 employees is filed under this city and its coordinate sits 26.45 miles from the centroid, in a different county — assigned by the address on its mine registration rather than by position.

The county field survives that error and the city field does not, which is the honest limit of the check: a Washington county is large enough to absorb a thirty-mile mistake and a city is not.

For what it is: within ten miles of that quarry the federal bridge inventory records 49 structures, 5 of them coded below legal loads, four county-maintained and one the state’s, the nearest 6.89 miles away. The tightest rates 13.6 metric tonnes, about 15.0 US tons, and carries a state route 8.32 miles out — over the 11.0-tonne tare of an empty tandem dump, about 2.6 tonnes of stone. Hard, and thirty miles from here.

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

Those postings bind one quarry. The statute binds everything, 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.

After 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, dump trucks and aggregate haulers, 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 Cowlitz 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 five yards between 1.20 miles and 1.86 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 run log and chip work out of the hills its whole life. Does that hurt?No. Tell us what it pulled and roughly how long it did it. A frame that has been loaded hard is a fact about the truck, and we would rather know it than find it.
• Do you come out to Cowlitz County?Yes, all of it and the towns around it — the five yards inside 1.86 miles included, whatever the record decides to call 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 contract that ended and took the run with it. A truck parked up since somebody stopped driving it, costing insurance every month it does not turn a wheel.

Across Cowlitz County it is the same trucks for the same reasons, most of them working within 1.86 miles of a yard that carries somebody else’s name.

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.