We buy trucks in Longview

The Port of Longview runs 8 marine terminals over 835 acres of waterfront industrial property, on the deep-draft Columbia River and 66 miles from the Pacific Ocean. That last number is the one that shapes the trucking: this is ocean freight handled inland, so the trucks working it are doing short drayage legs to a dock rather than running to a coast.

835 acres is a lot of gate to gate. Flatbed and log work, day cabs turning inside the property, dump trucks on the yards, and the equipment that goes with loading breakbulk rather than boxes.

A rail yard sits 1.68 miles from the centroid, filed under a name that spells Weyerhaeuser without its second e. Its carrier field reads Plate Valley Trolley — a string that turns up on fourteen rows across nine states, every one of them a large private industrial facility. What it represents was not determined, and the commodities the yard handles were not determined either.

The port row itself carries no operator at all in the source. We are telling you that rather than filling it in.

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

What those trucks may legally carry off that property is a statute question, and the statute does not answer it with 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 weight 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, flatbeds and day cabs, dump trucks and aggregate haulers, road tractors, 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 835 acres on the river and the yard 1.68 miles from downtown 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 been on log and flatbed work its whole life. Does that count against it?No. Tell us what it pulled and roughly how long it did it, and we’ll take it from there. A frame that has been loaded hard is a fact about the truck, not a reason to walk away.
• Do you come out to Cowlitz County?Yes, all of it and the towns around it — the 835 acres of port property 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 contract off the docks that ended. 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, whether they worked the 835 acres on the river or the yard 1.68 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.