We buy trucks in Lake Shore

Three operations are attached to Lake Shore in the node list and all three are the Port of Vancouver or its yard — a petroleum port row 3.93 miles from the centroid, a liquid bulk terminal at 3.83 miles, and a rail terminal yard under BNSF Railway at 3.78 miles.

What moves through it is mostly farm freight rather than fuel. A published federal port profile puts bulk grains — mostly wheat — soybeans and grain products at 96 percent of exports through that port. That profile is 2015 vintage and the current share was not determined, so take the figure as what it is: a decade-old measurement, quoted with its date rather than dressed up as today’s.

Grain at that share means hopper bottoms and bulk rigs running to a berth, and the seasonal shape that goes with harvest freight — hard weeks and quiet ones rather than a flat year.

The port and rail-yard sidecars under docs/facts/node/; USDA port profile, 2015 vintage. Distances are straight-line to the place centroid, not drives.

Those three distances all point outward from a small unincorporated community, and that is the oddity. Every one of the three coordinates lies inside Vancouver city, which carries a page of its own — but each row is filed here instead, because this place’s centroid happens to be the nearest one to the coordinate.

It is a known shape rather than a one-off: a small census place on the edge of a large city ends up nearest to something well inside the city, and the row lands on the small place. The same cause has been recorded in Texas, Oregon and South Carolina. Here it puts the berths at 3.93 miles and the terminal yard at 3.78 miles from a community that does not contain either.

None of it changes what we buy or where we come out to. It is here because a page quoting distances to a hundredth of a mile owes you the rows it does not trust.

Those berths load to a ceiling the statute sets, and it does not resolve to one 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 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. Grain hauls and bulk rigs, tankers, day cabs and road tractors, dump trucks and aggregate haulers, 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 Clark 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 berths and the terminal yard 3.78 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 only works a few months a year on harvest freight. Does sitting hurt it?Sitting is a fact about a truck, not a mark against it. Tell us roughly how it has been stored and whether it has been started through the quiet months, and we’ll take it from there.
• Do you come out to Clark County?Yes, all of it and the towns around it — the berths 3.93 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 hauling contract that ended with a season. A truck sitting behind a shed since somebody stopped driving it, costing insurance every month it does not turn a wheel.

Across Clark County it is the same trucks for the same reasons, most of them running to a berth 3.83 miles from here under somebody else’s postcode.

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.