We buy trucks in SeaTac

One operation is attached to SeaTac in the node list: a rail yard under BNSF Railway, 2.86 miles from the centroid, placed here by nearest-centroid fallback. Its coordinate lies inside Kent city, which carries a page of its own.

This one is a plainer error than most of its kind. The list already uses Kent as a place for other rows — an auto ramp is filed under it directly — so the correction is not a judgement call about small places and large ones. The row simply landed in the wrong one.

The correction is not hypothetical either: the Kent Auto-Ramp is filed under Kent directly, a couple of miles from this row.

The row says something about itself too. Its coordinate is the mean of a track polyline’s vertices out of the National Transportation Atlas rail-yards layer rather than a surveyed point, and the record gives it a working radius of 75 miles, flagged as estimated, on the basis that what moves around a yard like this is local drayage and transload.

What that yard handles could not be determined from any source read for the batch. What it means for trucks is airport-and-warehouse country: short drayage legs, many turns in a shift, hours going on much faster than miles.

The rail-yard sidecar under docs/facts/node/ and the node list at docs/nodes/node-list.json. The distance is straight-line to the place centroid, not a drive.

Whatever is going out on those short legs, the ceiling is a statute question and the statute gives no single 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 the load 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. Day cabs and road tractors, box trucks and straight trucks, dump trucks and aggregate haulers, flatbeds, tankers, rollbacks, service bodies, and the work trucks and pickups that go with a crew.

Box trucks and straight trucks are not a King 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 — including the ones this page has no dataset for, which around a yard 2.86 miles out is most of them.

• 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 short-haul truck with big hours and modest miles. Is that a mark against it?No, and it is the ordinary shape of a truck that works close in. Give us the hours as well as the miles — on short-turn work the hours are the honest number.
• Do you come out to King County?Yes, all of it and the towns around it — the yard 2.86 miles out included, wherever the record decides it lives. 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.

Around King County it is the same trucks for the same reasons, most of them turning at a yard 2.86 miles away that the record files under the wrong city.

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.