We buy trucks in Spokane

Twelve operations are attached to Spokane in the node list and eight of them are rail yards, which is the most of any city in this state’s lane. Four are BNSF Railway — Erie Street Yard at 1.89 miles from the centroid, Burlington at 2.04 miles, Erie Street at 2.15 miles and Yardley at 4.64 miles. Four are Union Pacific: Si at 3.01 miles, Si Yard at 3.25 miles, Spokane Yard at 4.30 miles and Spokane at 4.53 miles.

Then there is an intermodal ramp, which is a different job again — trailers and containers coming off flat cars and going out behind a day cab, usually out and back in a shift. A flour mill and a liquid bulk terminal 3.99 miles out sit on the same road network, and a sand and gravel operation at Sullivan Road runs six people on open-topped tandem work.

So the truck population here is drayage-shaped rather than long-haul-shaped: a lot of day cabs, a lot of short turns, and equipment that racks up hours faster than it racks up miles. You know better than we do what that does to a driveline over a few years.

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

Those distances come with a caveat we would rather print than bury. Spokane and Spokane Yard are both filed under Spokane under Union Pacific, and both coordinates land inside Spokane Valley city, which carries a page of its own. The pair is misattached as a unit, each half naming one place and sitting in the next.

The Burlington row is stranger. There are two rows named Burlington in this state and one named Burlington Yard; the genuine pair sits 0.13 miles apart in the town of Burlington. This row, filed under Spokane, is 234.6 miles from both of them.

None of that changes what we buy or where we come out to. It is here because a page that quotes distances to a hundredth of a mile owes you the ones it does not trust, and because what those yards actually handle could not be determined from any source read for the batch.

Whatever those yards move, the trucks moving it answer to one statute, and it does not resolve to a 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 weight 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, dump trucks and aggregate haulers, tankers, flatbeds, 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 Spokane 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 Union Pacific yards, the Erie Street pair, the ramp and the terminal 3.99 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 is a day cab with high hours and low miles. Does that hurt?It is normal here and we read it as normal. Tell us the hours as well as the miles and we’ll take it from there.
• Do you come out to Spokane County?Yes, all of it and the towns around it — including the Union Pacific pair out at 4.53 miles that the record files under one place and puts in another, and Yardley at 4.64 miles. 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 that dried up. A truck sitting behind a shop since somebody stopped driving it, costing insurance every month it does not turn a wheel.

Across the county the same trucks come up for the same reasons, whether they drayed off the ramp, switched at Erie Street, or ran the 3.99 miles out to the terminal.

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.