We buy trucks in Mount Vernon

One operation is attached to Mount Vernon in the node list: a crushed-stone quarry running 5 employees, 2.42 miles from the middle of town. That is a small gate with a short haul out of it, which is the ordinary shape of aggregate work — open-topped tandems and tri-axles doing the same few miles over and over.

A short haul does not mean an easy one. On a run that never leaves the county, the thing that decides what a truck can put on is not the highway. It is whatever sits between the pit and the job.

MSHA Mine Data Retrieval System; U.S. Census 2024 Gazetteer for the place centroid. The distance is straight-line, not a drive.

Those few miles run over a network the federal bridge inventory has measured. Within ten miles of the quarry, straight-line, it records 104 structures. 6 are coded posted for load and 6 are coded below legal loads, and the nearest of them is 0.95 miles out.

Five of those six restricted structures are county-maintained, one is the state’s and none is the city’s — which is the ordinary Washington arrangement. Statewide the county tier and the state tier are almost exactly the same size, 40.3% and 39.8% of all structures, but a county bridge is coded below legal loads at 15.6% against 2.1% for a state bridge. Where the two tiers are equal in size, the county’s is the one that decides.

The tightest crossing in that circle rates 22.7 metric tonnes, about 25.0 US tons, and it carries Blackburn Street 2.17 miles out. Over the 11.0-tonne tare of an empty tandem dump that admits roughly 11.7 tonnes of stone — a part load, not a full one, and not a bridge you meet by accident on a short haul.

Read that figure as an upper bound rather than a promise. It is the minimum inside a ten-mile circle, and at 64.1% of the nodes measured this way a tighter crossing turns up 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.

Those bridges are the local limit. The general one is a statute, and it does not settle on a 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 rules on them, 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 Skagit 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 quarry 2.42 miles out and the county roads around it 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 tandem dump that only ever ran local. Is that a problem?The opposite, usually. Tell us the hours as well as the miles — a truck that did short hauls out of one pit has a different history from one that did the same miles on a highway, and it is the hours that show it.
• Do you come out to Skagit County?Yes, all of it and the towns around it — the quarry 2.42 miles out included, and the county roads with the six restrictions on 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 job that finished and did not get replaced. A truck sitting behind a shop since somebody stopped driving it, costing insurance every month it does not turn a wheel.

Across Skagit County it is the same trucks for the same reasons, most of them working the 2.42 miles between the pit and the job.

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.