We buy trucks in Shelton

Four operations are attached to Shelton in the node list and all four are stone, sand or gravel. Kennedy Creek Quarry works traprock with 5 employees, 8.15 miles from the centroid. The Johns Prairie mine runs 9 on construction sand and gravel, the Shelton Pit runs 5, and the McEwan Prairie Pit runs 2.

Twenty-one people across four gates is a real local aggregate trade rather than one operation with a yard. Traprock and gravel are two different loads — hard rock that grosses out before the box looks full, and bulkier material that fills it first — and both go in open-topped tandems and tri-axles.

This is timber country as well, so the two feed each other: rock goes onto the woods roads and log rigs come back over it.

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 hauls run over a county that hardly posts anything. Mason County maintains 58 bridges and posts exactly two of them — and within ten miles of the traprock gate the federal inventory records 82 structures with 2 coded below legal loads, both county-maintained, the nearest 1.38 miles out.

One of those two posted bridges does a lot of work. It carries Ewbank Road, rates 18.1 metric tonnes, about 20.0 US tons, and sits 7.95 miles from this gate — and it is also the crossing that caps the portable plant filed under Aberdeen, from 9.93 miles on its own side. Two separate registrations in two different filings, capped by one county bridge.

Over the 11.0-tonne tare of an empty tandem dump that admits roughly 7.1 tonnes of stone. A part load, but a workable one.

Read it as an upper bound. 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.

That one crossing is the local ceiling. The statute above it does not resolve to a single number.

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 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. Log trucks and timber rigs, 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 Mason 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 four gates, the traprock one 8.15 miles out, 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 run rock and logs off gravel roads its whole life. Does that hurt?No. Tell us what it pulled and roughly how long it did it — a frame worked hard on rough surfacing is a fact about the truck, and we would rather know it than find it.
• Do you come out to Mason County?Yes, all of it and the towns around it — the four gates included, and the Ewbank Road crossing 7.95 miles from the traprock one. 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 woods contract that finished. A truck sitting behind a shed since somebody stopped driving it, costing insurance every month it does not turn a wheel.

Around Mason County it is the same trucks for the same reasons, most of them working out of one of the four gates within 8.15 miles of town.

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.