We buy trucks in Richland

Three operations are attached to Richland in the node list. The Hanford Pit works crushed stone with 6 employees, 2.03 miles from the town centroid — open-topped tandem work on a short haul.

The other two are rail yards, and they are the same site read twice: Tri-City at 2.88 miles and Tri-City Yard at 3.01 miles, 0.15 miles apart, both under the Tri-City Railroad. The name does not point at any one place. It is the Tri-Cities — Richland, Pasco and Kennewick — so it names a group of towns rather than a town. That is a fourth kind of node name, and a page that files everything under one city ought to say so.

What those yards handle could not be determined from any source read for the batch. Short-line work is short-turn work, though, and that puts day cabs and hours-heavy equipment on the same roads as the stone.

MSHA Mine Data Retrieval System; the node list at docs/nodes/node-list.json. Distances are straight-line to the place centroid, not drives.

Those short hauls run over a network that inverts the state pattern. Within ten miles of the pit the federal bridge inventory records 95 structures, 5 posted for load and 5 coded below legal loads, the nearest 2.75 miles out.

Four of those five restricted structures are city-maintained and one is the county’s. Statewide it is the other way about: a Washington county bridge is coded below legal loads at 15.6% and a state bridge at 2.1%, and the county tier is where the restrictions usually live. Here they are inside the city instead, which means the crossing that catches a loaded truck is more likely to be on a street than on a county road out of town.

The tightest rates 19.4 metric tonnes, about 21.4 US tons, and it carries 38th Avenue 2.75 miles from the gate. Over the 11.0-tonne tare of an empty tandem dump that admits about 8.4 tonnes of stone — well under a full load, on a haul short enough that you would meet it often.

Take 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 and twenty miles out.

FHWA National Bridge Inventory 2025, Washington file, items 41, 64 and 70; docs/nodes/FINDING-radius-sensitivity.md for the radius figure.

Those are the crossings. The statute above them is the other half, and it does not give 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 what a truck may carry, 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 Benton 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 pit 2.03 miles out and the short-line yards across town 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 spent its life going part-loaded because of the bridges. Does that show?It usually shows as low miles against high hours, and we read it that way rather than as a truck that has been sitting. Give us both numbers.
• Do you come out to Benton County?Yes, all of it and the rest of the Tri-Cities with it — the pit 2.03 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 contract that ended. A truck parked behind a shop since somebody stopped driving it, costing insurance every month it does not turn a wheel.

Across Benton County it is the same trucks for the same reasons, whether they hauled off the pit 2.03 miles out or switched cars for the short line.

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.