We buy trucks in Woodland

One operation is attached to Woodland in the node list: a limestone blending and storage terminal running 2 employees, 2.43 miles from the centroid.

A blending and storage operation is not quite a quarry. Material comes in, gets mixed or held, and goes back out — so the trucks working it run both ways rather than one, and the loads are graded product rather than run-of-pit stone. Limestone is carbonate rather than quartz-bearing rock, which is a property of the material and not a measurement anyone took here.

What that means on the road is tandems and tri-axles on short legs, with tankers and bulk rigs where the product moves that way. And around here the road does something none of the inland gates do.

MSHA Mine Data Retrieval System; the node list at docs/nodes/node-list.json. The distance is straight-line to the place centroid, not a drive.

That circle crosses the Columbia. Within ten miles of the terminal the federal bridge inventory records 60 structures — 34 in Washington and 26 in Oregon — because the radius spans a state line and the count is taken from every state file with structures inside it rather than from this state alone.

Seven of the sixty are posted for load and seven are coded below legal loads, of which two are county-maintained. The nearest restriction is 3.71 miles out.

And the crossing that sets the commercial floor is not on this side of the river. It rates 14.6 metric tonnes, about 16.1 US tons, and sits 4.89 miles away on the Oregon side — so the practical cap on a loaded tandem out of this gate is written into another state’s bridge file. Over the 11.0-tonne tare of an empty tandem dump it admits about 3.6 tonnes of product.

Read it as an upper bound. It 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 and Oregon files, items 41, 64 and 70; docs/nodes/FINDING-radius-sensitivity.md for the radius figure.

That crossing is Oregon’s. The statute on this side of the river is the other half, and it does not settle on one 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 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, tankers and bulk rigs, 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 Cowlitz 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 terminal 2.43 miles out and the roads running south over the river 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 runs into Oregon most weeks. Does that complicate the sale?No. We need the title, and which side of the river the work was on is not part of that. Bring it as it is.
• Do you come out to Cowlitz County?Yes, all of it and the towns around it — the terminal 2.43 miles out included, and the crossings 3.71 miles beyond it. 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 contract that ended and took the run with it. A truck sitting behind a shed since somebody stopped driving it, costing insurance every month it does not turn a wheel.

Around Cowlitz County it is the same trucks for the same reasons, most of them working within 2.43 miles of the terminal or over the river and back.

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.