We buy trucks in Seattle

Twenty-six operations are attached to Seattle in the node list, which is the largest set in this lane, and they sort into three trades rather than twenty-six. The cement plant reports 83 employees to the federal mine regulator, works cement under MSHA ID 4500359, and its operator of record is Ash Grove Cement Company. That is pneumatic dry-bulk work: the engine runs at the load during discharge, the blower and the aeration pads wear on the trailer, and a tank grosses out long before it looks full.

Then stone. Arcosa Specialty Materials Seattle #1890 runs 12 employees on crushed limestone, 4.57 miles from the centroid — open-topped tandem work on short hauls.

Everything else is boxes. Fourteen rail yards and seven intermodal ramps sit inside five miles of the middle of town, from Elliott Bay Park Yard at 0.81 miles out to Van Asselt at 4.92 miles, most of them BNSF Railway with Union Pacific on a couple. That is a drayage economy: day cabs, short turns, hours piling up faster than miles.

One thing about the port itself that is easy to get wrong. Washington runs 75 public port districts, more than any other state, each an independent body of elected commissioners with its own taxing authority. There is no single Washington port rule, so nothing that is true at one gate here can be assumed at the next.

MSHA Mine Data Retrieval System; the node list at docs/nodes/node-list.json; RCW 53.04.010 for the port districts. Distances are straight-line to the place centroid, not drives.

Those short hauls run over the most heavily built network in this lane by a distance. Within ten miles of the limestone pit the federal bridge inventory records 555 structures — more than four times the next circle here — and 30 of them are coded below legal loads. That is 5.4%, a lower rate than most of this state, on a far larger base.

The interesting part is who owns them. Eighteen are state-maintained, ten are the city’s and exactly one is the county’s. This is the only node in its batch whose restrictions span three tiers at once, and the only one where the city tier is the second largest — which is what a metropolitan circle looks like in a state whose county and state tiers are otherwise evenly matched. King County maintains 142 bridges and posts 9 of them.

The tightest crossing rates 13.0 metric tonnes, about 14.3 US tons, and it carries Overlake Drive 6.83 miles out — a city road, not a county one. Over the 11.0-tonne tare of an empty tandem dump that admits roughly 2.0 tonnes of stone, which is close to nothing. The nearest restriction of any kind is 0.96 miles from the gate.

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 the 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 are the crossings. The statute over 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 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, pneumatic cement tankers, dump trucks and aggregate haulers, 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 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. The kiln, the pit 4.57 miles out and the yards from 0.81 miles to 4.92 miles 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 drayage day cab with big hours and modest miles. Is that a mark against it?No, and it is the normal shape of a truck here. Give us the hours as well as the miles — on a container tractor the hours are the honest number and we read them that way.
• Do you come out to King County?Yes, all of it and the towns around it — the pit 4.57 miles out and the yards from 0.81 miles in 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 lane or 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 King County the same trucks come up for the same reasons, whether they drayed boxes off the yards 0.81 miles from downtown or hauled stone off the pit 4.57 miles out.

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.