We buy trucks in Moses Lake

Three operations are attached to Moses Lake in the node list and all three are stone, sand or gravel. A portable crusher runs 10 employees, 3.08 miles from the centroid; a second portable runs 3; a wash plant runs 2.

Two portables out of three gates is the shape here. A portable plant moves to the material, so the route out of it changes with the job and the trucks doing that work meet a new set of roads every few months rather than the same ones every day.

That matters more than usual around here, because of what one of those roads turns out to be.

MSHA Mine Data Retrieval System; the node list at docs/nodes/node-list.json. The distance is straight-line to the place centroid, not a drive.

Those changing routes run over a circle with an unusually low floor in it. Within ten miles of the gate the federal bridge inventory records 64 structures, 8 posted for load and 8 coded below legal loads — 12.5% — and the nearest is 3.43 miles out.

The crossing that sets the commercial floor rates 11.1 metric tonnes. An empty tandem dump weighs about 11.0, so that structure admits roughly a tenth of a tonne of payload — about a hundred kilograms. In practice it is a crossing a loaded truck does not use at all, and the honest way to put it is that the rating is a floor rather than a route.

It is not a county road, either. It carries an access road 4.83 miles from the gate and is maintained by an other-local agency, a tier that holds only 68 structures in the whole state and has 22.1% of them below legal loads — the worst-conditioned tier in Washington. Grant County itself maintains 194 bridges and posts 38, and two of the eight restrictions here are its.

Read the floor as an upper bound on how tight things get, not the worst case. 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 floor and it is a hard one. The statute over it does not resolve to a single 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.

Past 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 Grant 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 three gates, the nearest 3.08 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 followed portable plants around for years. Does that count against it?No, and it explains a lot about a truck. Tell us roughly what it hauled and how often it changed sites, and we’ll take it from there.
• Do you come out to Grant County?Yes, all of it and the towns around it — the three gates and the roads with eight restrictions on them included, the nearest 3.43 miles out. 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 shed since somebody stopped driving it, costing insurance every month it does not turn a wheel.

Across Grant County it is the same trucks for the same reasons, most of them working out of a gate within 3.08 miles of town and a new set of roads every season.

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.