We buy trucks in Washtucna

Two operations are attached to Washtucna in the node list and neither of them is close. One sits 7.04 miles from the centroid under the Palouse River & Coulee City Railroad; the other is 10.66 miles out under Union Pacific, and that is the longest fallback attachment in the state.

Both coordinates fall inside no incorporated place at all, which means nothing checks either attachment. They are filed here because this is the nearest incorporated place to a long stretch of line — a town of a few hundred people standing in for a piece of country much bigger than itself.

That is better said plainly than dressed up. This is farm country and the freight that moves through it is farm freight: hopper bottoms and bulk rigs on long, seasonal legs, with hard weeks at harvest and quiet ones between. What either yard handles could not be determined from any source read for the batch.

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 a grain rig grosses out here answers to one statute, and it does not settle on a 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 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. Grain hauls and bulk rigs, day cabs and road tractors, dump trucks and aggregate haulers, flatbeds, 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 an Adams 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 yard 7.04 miles out is the nearest thing on the record, and most of what we buy here never goes near it.

• 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.
• We are a long way out. Are you really going to come?Out here the remote purchase is often the straight answer rather than the fallback: we buy it and arrange the tow, and moving it is not left to you. If you would rather we came, we come.
• Do you come out to Adams County?Yes, all of it and the country around it — the yards 10.66 miles out included, and the farms nowhere near them. 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, and nobody in the family wanting the truck. A medical that went the wrong way. A hauling contract that ended with a season. A truck sitting behind a shed since somebody stopped driving it, costing insurance every month it does not turn a wheel.

Across Adams County it is the same trucks for the same reasons, most of them a good deal further from a rail yard than the 7.04 miles this page can point at.

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.