We buy trucks in Greensboro

The Siloam Quarry is the node here and reports 14 employees to the mine regulator. What sets this page apart is not its size but the roads it works.

Within ten miles the national bridge inventory records 69 structures, of which 7 are posted for load and 6 of those are county-maintained. The nearest posting is 4.6 miles from the gate, which sounds comfortable. The ratings are not.

Only four of the seven clear the weight of an empty tandem dump. The other three sit below it — the lowest at 9.0 metric tonnes, about 9.9 US tons — which means no commercial vehicle crosses them at all, loaded or empty. That is the lowest commercial share measured anywhere in this batch, and it is a different kind of constraint from a low cap.

That distinction is the whole point, and it changes what the work does to a machine. A posted crossing a truck can take part loaded is a decision: put less on, make another trip, and the wear lands in hoist cycles and brakes. A crossing rated below the tare of an empty tandem is not a decision at all. It is a road that is not there.

So the routing here is not load management, it is detour. Of the four that do carry commercial traffic, the binding usable rating is 14.5 metric tonnes, about 16.0 US tons, which admits something like three and a half tonnes of stone over the tare — against the twenty-five a legal 80,000 lb truck carries. Across Greene County as a whole, 6 of 34 county-maintained bridges are posted.

What that leaves on a truck is miles. An odometer inflated by going the long way round, tyres and brakes worn by a route chosen for its crossings, and a delivered tonnage that never matched the distance covered. Worth saying out loud when you describe the machine, because otherwise the mileage reads as hard use rather than as geography.

Those numbers deserve the same caveat every distance on these pages gets. The pit’s coordinates lie 6.70 miles from the Census centroid of the place the node list names, taking the nearest place of that name because a place name can occur more than once in a state.

The state qualified list carries the operation as source 071C on Bethany Road: granite, a Los Angeles abrasion loss of 39, absorption 0.59%, bulk specific gravity 2.616, and a magnesium sulphate soundness loss of 0.1, class A. At 39 the rock sits in the tougher half of the Georgia range, so it scours a body rather than degrading into fines and packing it.

Read the bridge figures as an upper bound rather than a promise. They are a minimum inside a ten-mile circle, and at roughly two thirds of the sites measured for this work a tighter crossing lies somewhere between ten miles and twenty. The gate is not the route.

Those crossings set the real ceiling, and the statute sets a second one that never gets reached. O.C.G.A. § 32-6-26 puts the general gross limit at 80,000 lb on state and US highways. HB 189 (2023), as amended by HB 164 (2025), lets forest-products and agricultural loads run ten per cent over — 88,000 lb on five axles — within 150 miles of origin, on state and local roads only, and outside the air-quality non-attainment counties.

Greene is not one of the thirteen metro counties, so the geographic condition is met and a timber load out of these woods does qualify. Crushed stone does not: the provision does not name it, granite and concrete were taken out of the commodity list before enactment, and it is void on the interstate system anyway.

There is a bleak symmetry in it here. The allowance applies on state and local roads only, and the local roads in this county are the ones carrying three crossings a commercial vehicle cannot use. A qualifying load is granted extra weight on the network least able to take it.

Below that, the inversion: Georgia state and US highways take the forest-products load at 84,000 lb including tolerances while the interstate caps at 80,000 lb plus the federal bridge formula, so the interstate is the lower limit. County roads run to 56,000 lb unless the truck is making a pickup or delivery on that road.

O.C.G.A. § 32-6-26; HB 189 (2023) as amended by HB 164 (2025). Information, not legal advice.

Those rules decide the load. This one decides the sale, and it is one sentence.

Everything after it is a fix rather than a category. A lost title is a counter transaction at a tag office — a driver’s licence, the year, make and model, the vehicle identity number, a fee of $18, printed on the spot in about forty-five minutes depending on the line. Where no title exists, the bonded route runs through a surety company, an application with a sales document, a police inspection form confirming the vehicle is not stolen, then the tag office.

Georgia brands salvage by a total-loss formula rather than a fixed percentage, weighing repair cost against actual cash value with salvage value factored in, where Kentucky uses a flat 75% of retail and Alabama 75% of fair retail value before the damage. Under O.C.G.A. § 40-3-37 the commissioner inspects a salvaged or rebuilt vehicle before any title issues, and the rebuild has to have been done in Georgia.

Where there is a lien on it the release is the slow part. Georgia files liens electronically and a lienholder on that programme cannot issue a paper release; only lienholders holding liens on fewer than five Georgia-titled vehicles may use the paper certificate. Emissions is not a step — the programme covers thirteen metro counties, this is not one, and diesel and anything above 8,500 lb rated gross are outside it regardless.

O.C.G.A. § 40-3-37; Georgia Department of Revenue title, lien and emissions guidance. Information, not legal advice.

None of that changes what we buy. Dump trucks and aggregate haulers off Bethany Road. Timber rigs and farm trucks on the loads that do qualify for the ten per cent. Day cabs and road tractors on the runs out. Box trucks, straight trucks, flatbeds, rollbacks, tankers, service bodies, and the work trucks and pickups that go out with a crew across Greene County.

Whatever you drive, the offer doesn’t change. We buy all of them.

• 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 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. A lost title has a counter replacement; where none exists there is a bonded route. Neither stops a sale.
• The mileage is high for the tonnage it moved. Is that a red flag?Not in Greene County. Three of the seven posted crossings inside ten miles are rated below an empty tandem and the nearest of them is 4.6 miles from the Bethany Road gate, so the route goes the long way round and the odometer records the detour rather than the work. Send the hours if the machine has a meter.
• Can you even get a tow truck to it?Yes — that is our problem to solve, not yours. We buy it remotely and arrange the tow, and we work the crossings out at our end. We also come to you and drive it away, or come to you and tow it, and you can bring it to us.

Those last two tend to come up together, and what is behind them has nothing to do with Bethany Road or with a bridge rating in Greene County.

Retiring. A medical that went the wrong way. A hauling job that ended and left one machine too many in the yard. Sometimes it is only that the truck has been parked since the last contract finished, and every month it sits is another month of insurance on something that isn’t turning a wheel.

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.