We buy trucks in Franklin

One crushed-stone registration sits under this city, carrying 14 employees on the MSHA register and 2.42 miles from the centroid. What surrounds it is one of the densest road networks anywhere in this measurement: 730 structures within ten miles, the seventh densest of the 1,018 nodes measured this way, behind Bally Mountain Quarry at 835, Belle Plant at 772 and Kentucky Avenue Mine at 769.

Only five of those 730 are coded below legal loads — seven tenths of one per cent. Three are state-maintained and two are city-maintained. Not one is the county’s: Milwaukee County posts 1 of the 85 bridges it maintains, and it has no town tier at all, which is unusual in a state where towns hold most of the restrictions.

Those five include the crossing that decides what this pit can load, and it is not what anybody would guess. The commercial floor here is 11.4 metric tonnes on NBI record P40086600000000, a local cemetery service road with maintenance code 04 — a city — 6.03 miles out.

Item 64 records the gross weight of the rating vehicle, so 11.4 tonnes admits about four hundred kilograms of stone over the 11.0 tonne tare of an empty tandem dump. Seven hundred and thirty bridges, and the one that binds a loaded truck is a cemetery service road four hundred kilograms above the weight of an empty one.

Which is the lesson to carry off this page. Sussex Quarry sits in a circle of 327 structures and keeps twenty tonnes of payload; this pit sits in 730 and keeps four hundred kilograms. More crossings is not more room. It is more chances for one of them to be the binding one, and the binding one here is a service road.

All of which moves again three times a year, under programmes that are routinely described as though they were one. A frozen road declaration is normally in force from the middle of December to late February or early March, and it raises what may be carried. The Class II programme runs from about the first of March to roughly the middle of May. Posted roads is a third programme under a different guideline, covering roads that carry less than the legal limit either periodically through the year or only while the ground is thawing.

The middle one is the one people get wrong. Class II is not a reduction in legal axle or gross weight at all. Under maintenance manual guideline 37.10 the department may restrict the travel of vehicles running on overweight permits, because the subgrade is unstable while frost is leaving the ground. It caps what a single-trip movement may weigh over those roads, makes annual non-divisible permit holders avoid them, and suspends every divisible load permit type on all state highways for the duration of the thaw. A truck at ordinary legal weight is not touched by it. A truck on a permit is.

And the list is not fixed anywhere. District Chief System Operations Managers decide which sections qualify each year, and around the middle of December the bureau of highway operations asks for those lists, combines them and publishes a statewide list and map. Last year’s answer does not carry over.

WisDOT maintenance manual 37.10, with Wis. Stat. §§ 348.26(2) and 348.27(2) behind it. Information, not legal advice.

None of that reaches the paperwork, which is the short part. That is the rule, and 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 one stops a sale.

One provision can move without anybody deciding to move it. Under Wis. Stat. § 342.065, where an insurance claim payment including any deductible exceeds 70 percent of a vehicle’s fair market value, the insurer must notify the department in writing within thirty days. The trigger is the payment rather than somebody’s repair estimate, and a purchaser of a salvage vehicle not already titled as one must apply promptly after delivery for a salvage certificate of title. So the paperwork can be ahead of the truck, which is the reason to check it before a sale rather than after.

Wis. Stat. § 342.065. Information, not legal advice, and only as current as the day it was read.

None of that changes what we are interested in. Dump trucks and aggregate haulers off the stone 2.42 miles out. Flatbeds and box trucks out of the trades. Road tractors and day cabs on the runs across Milwaukee County. Work trucks and pickups off crews. Whatever you drive, the offer does not change. We buy all of them.

We come to you and drive it away, we come to you and tow it, or we buy it remotely and arrange the tow with nobody visiting at all. All of those are ordinary in a place this size, and bringing it to us is an option too if that suits your week.

• 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.
• How am I paid?Cash or electronic payment. That is the whole list.
• Is there a bridge that will stop the tow?An empty tow, no. A loaded truck is a different question — the binding crossing is 6.03 miles out and rated 11.4 metric tonnes, which is barely above an empty tandem. Routing round it is our problem rather than yours.
• There are bridges everywhere here, surely one of them works.That is the intuition this network breaks. There are 730 structures inside ten miles across Milwaukee County and the one that decides the load is a cemetery service road. Density is not slack.
• Do I have to bring it to you?No. We come to you and drive it away, we come to you and tow it, or we buy it remotely and arrange the tow with nobody visiting at all.
• What about the title?We need one unless the truck is old enough that it never had one. A lost title has a counter replacement; where none exists there is a bonded route.

None of those is really the reason for the call. Retiring. A medical that went the wrong way. A contract that ended and never got replaced. A tri-axle standing on a yard in Milwaukee County 2.42 miles from the middle of town, insured every month and not turning a wheel since the last job finished.

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.