We buy trucks in South Wenatchee

Two operations are attached to South Wenatchee in the node list and both are rail yards under BNSF Railway, at 0.10 miles and 0.14 miles from the centroid. That is the closest any node in this lane sits to the middle of the place it is filed under — near enough that the yard and the town are effectively the same address.

The name on both rows is Apple, which is the one thing on this page that says anything about what moves through here. We are going to leave it at that: what the yard actually handles could not be determined from any source read for the batch, and a name is a name rather than a manifest.

What being that close does mean is short legs and many of them. Trucks working a yard on the doorstep collect hours rather than distance, and you know better than we do what that does to one over a few seasons.

The rail-yard sidecars under docs/facts/node/ and the node list at docs/nodes/node-list.json. Distances are straight-line to the place centroid, not drives.

Whatever is loaded at that dock, the ceiling on it is a statute question, and the statute does not answer with 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.

Beyond 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. Day cabs and road tractors, flatbeds, dump trucks and aggregate haulers, tankers, rollbacks, service bodies, box trucks and straight trucks, and the work trucks and pickups that go with a crew.

Box trucks and straight trucks are not a Chelan 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 0.10 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 reefer unit. Does the box come into it?Tell us what the unit is and roughly its hours and we’ll take it from there. On a refrigerated truck the unit has a service life of its own and we would rather hear about it than guess.
• Do you come out to Chelan County?Yes, all of it and the towns around it — a yard 0.14 miles from the centre 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 season that did not come back. A truck sitting behind a shed since somebody stopped driving it, costing insurance every month it does not turn a wheel.

Around Chelan County it is the same trucks for the same reasons, most of them turning at a yard 0.10 miles away several times a day.

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.