Island County
One command, four names, and no word shared between them
Two operations are attached to Whidbey Island Station in the node list and both are military installations — an air station 0.80 miles from the centroid and a second site 1.90 miles out.
They are part of a set of four rows on this island, filed across three different place labels, and only one of the four names says what it belongs to. The others read as a hill, a seaplane base and an outlying field. Nothing groups them: no shared word, no shared city, no shared component code. Elsewhere in this dataset a scattered command at least shares a name or a town; here the four share nothing but the island under them.
For trucks that matters less than the ground does. An air station and its outlying sites run on contractor work — aggregate, fuel, low-boy moves, service bodies — and that equipment is what eventually comes up for sale around here.
The installation 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.
Washington weight law
There is no single number, and the statute is why
Whatever a contractor is hauling out there, the ceiling on it is a statute question, and the statute gives no 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.
Washington paperwork
We need a title — unless it never had one
Beyond 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.
What we buy here
None of that narrows what we will look at. Day cabs and road tractors, flatbeds, dump trucks and aggregate haulers, rollbacks, service bodies, tankers, box trucks and straight trucks, and the work trucks and pickups that go with a crew.
Box trucks and straight trucks are not an Island 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 air station 0.80 miles out and the roads serving it are where most of them turn up.
We buy complete trucks. If the engine, transmission, doors, rear ends, drive shafts, wheels or anything under the hood have been removed, we can’t buy it. Small things — a missing bumper — are fine.
Straight answers
The questions we get asked in Whidbey Island Station
- 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.
- Do I have to get it off the island myself?No. Out here that is the common case rather than the exception: we buy plenty of trucks remotely and arrange the tow ourselves, and the crossing is ours to sort out.
- Do you come out to Island County?Yes. Being on an island is not a reason we would not — the sites 1.90 miles out 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.
Why people call
Those questions come up because the reasons for selling are mostly personal. Retiring. A medical that went the wrong way. A contract on the station that finished. A truck sitting behind a shed since somebody stopped driving it, costing insurance every month it does not turn a wheel.
Across Island County it is the same trucks for the same reasons, and the 0.80 miles to the gate is the only part that is different from anywhere else.
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.