We buy trucks in Naches

Two operations are attached to Naches in the node list. Horseshoe Bend Quarry works crushed stone with 3 employees, 6.87 miles from the town centroid — a small gate on a rural haul.

The second row is a military installation, and it is the strangest entry in this lane. It is named for Joint Base Lewis-McChord, but its coordinate is not at that base: it is at the Yakima Training Center, and the base it names sits about 94.1 miles west in another county. The name is right about a real place and the coordinate is right about a different one.

The ground the coordinate points at is not a small thing. That training centre is recorded at 323,431 acres, with a second source giving about 327,000 — the two differ by roughly a per cent and neither is adopted here. The base whose name is on the row runs 90,283 acres and employs more than 55,000 military and civilian people, which makes it the largest employer in the county it is actually in and the third largest in the state.

For trucks, the useful half is the ground rather than the name: a training area of that size runs on aggregate, water, fuel and low-boy work, and the equipment doing it is the equipment that eventually comes up for sale.

MSHA Mine Data Retrieval System; the installation and quarry sidecars under docs/facts/node/. Distances are straight-line to the place centroid, not drives.

Those hauls run through the most heavily posted county in this batch, and two numbers here get confused with each other, so this page separates them. Yakima County maintains 311 bridges and posts 97 of them — 31.2%, the highest county posting rate measured around here.

That is the county rate. It is not this quarry’s rate. Within ten miles of the gate the federal inventory records 45 structures and 4 coded below legal loads, which is 8.9%, and all four are county-maintained. A county posting nearly a third of its bridges, and the quarry inside it meets four: 31.2% and 8.9% are both true and neither predicts the other.

The tightest of the four rates 15.9 metric tonnes, about 17.5 US tons, and carries Thompson Road 9.64 miles out. Over the 11.0-tonne tare of an empty tandem dump that admits roughly 4.9 tonnes of stone — a part load, on a haul where the nearest restriction of any kind is 4.20 miles from the gate.

Read it as an upper bound rather than 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.

Those postings are the local ceiling. The statute above them does not resolve to one 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.

Beyond 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, tankers, 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 Yakima 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 6.87 miles out and the roads east towards the training ground 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 was a contractor truck working out on the training ground. Anything different about that?Not for us. Bring whatever paperwork came with it and we’ll take it from there — the title is the part that matters and a decal on the door is not.
• Do you come out to Yakima County?Yes, all of it and the towns around it — the quarry 6.87 miles out included, and the county roads with four 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 contract on the ground east of here that finished. A truck sitting behind a shop since somebody stopped driving it, costing insurance every month it does not turn a wheel.

Across Yakima County it is the same trucks for the same reasons, whether they hauled off the quarry 6.87 miles out or worked the training roads.

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.