We buy trucks in Sumas

Two operations are attached to Sumas in the node list. A crushed-limestone pit runs 3 employees, 0.64 miles from the centroid, and a BNSF Railway yard sits 0.30 miles out — the only rail row attached to this place.

A pit and a yard both inside a mile of the middle of a small town makes for an unusually tight working triangle: load, haul, turn, repeat, without ever getting up to speed. Hours accumulate, miles do not.

What the yard handles could not be determined from any source read for the batch. The pit is limestone, which is carbonate rather than quartz-bearing rock, so the exposure profile that goes with it is the carbonate one rather than a granite pit’s — a property of the material, not a measurement anyone took here.

MSHA Mine Data Retrieval System; the rail-yard sidecar under docs/facts/node/. Distances are straight-line to the place centroid, not drives.

That tight triangle runs over the most restricted circle in this batch. Within ten miles of the pit the federal inventory records 56 structures, 12 posted for load and 11 coded below legal loads — 19.6% — and the nearest is 0.44 miles out. Ten of the eleven are county-maintained and one is the city’s. Whatcom County maintains 136 bridges and posts 30.

Here the arithmetic works out kindly in one respect. The lowest rating in the circle is the same as the commercial floor, 17.8 metric tonnes or about 19.6 US tons, which means every one of the eleven caps a load rather than shutting a truck out altogether. Over the 11.0-tonne tare of an empty tandem dump that admits roughly 6.8 tonnes of stone. Part loads, but always a load.

And the circle has an edge that no radius setting can fix. Canada is about two miles north of here, and this repository holds no Canadian bridge file at all — so 56 structures is a count of what lies on one side of an international border, not a count of the roads a truck out of this pit can actually use. Take it as a bound on how open these routes are rather than as the answer.

The tightest crossing carries Gillies Road 4.29 miles from the gate. As everywhere, that figure 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.

Those crossings are the binding limit most days. The statute over them gives no single figure either.

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. 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 Whatcom 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 pit 0.64 miles out and the county roads with eleven restrictions on them 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 cross-border work. Does that change the paperwork?Not for us. We need the title, and where the truck has been working is not part of that. Bring whatever came with it and we’ll take it from there.
• Do you come out to Whatcom County?Yes, all of it and the towns around it — the pit 0.64 miles out included, and the crossing 0.44 miles from its gate. 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 job that finished and did not get replaced. A truck sitting behind a shop since somebody stopped driving it, costing insurance every month it does not turn a wheel.

Across Whatcom County it is the same trucks for the same reasons, most of them working within 0.44 miles of a crossing they have to think about.

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.