We buy trucks in Alton

Alton is a small place with a large employer beside it. The federal mine regulator records 115 employees at Cape Sandy number 1, whose coordinate lies 2.54 miles from the middle of Alton town — the nearest place of that name, which is how the row is attached.

Draw ten miles round that pit and the circle leaves the state. Fifty-two structures stand inside it, 47 of them from the Indiana bridge file and 5 from the Kentucky one, so the road network here is read from both state files rather than from Indiana alone.

That is not a technicality on the ground. A truck working out of Cape Sandy is inside a river county where the practical routes run to crossings, and the far bank is a different jurisdiction with its own inventory.

Those 52 structures are not evenly forgiving. Sixteen are coded posted for load, sixteen are coded below legal loads, and fourteen of those belong to Crawford County rather than to a state highway agency — the nearest of them 1.52 miles from the pit.

The lowest operating rating among them is 8.8 metric tonnes, which is under the 11.0-tonne tare of an empty tandem dump: no commercial vehicle crosses that one at all, loaded or not. The lowest rating that clears the tare is 12.6 tonnes, about 13.9 US tons, and that cap admits roughly 1.6 tonnes of stone on top of the empty truck.

Crawford County posts 41 of the 78 bridges it maintains, 52.6 per cent, which is the highest county rate measured anywhere in this research. And ten miles is a floor rather than a promise: at 64.1 per cent of the nodes measured this way, a tighter crossing turns up between ten miles and twenty.

FHWA National Bridge Inventory 2025, Indiana and Kentucky files, items 41, 64 and 70.

Those crossings sit under a statute that has already taken weight off the truck, because Indiana keys its allowance to the road rather than to the cargo.

Gross weight is 80,000 lb, single axles 20,000 and tandems 34,000 on the heavy-duty network the state designates. Off that network the gross falls to 73,280 lb, single axles to 18,000, and a tandem assembly is capped at 16,000 lb for each of its axles — 32,000 for the pair.

So a loaded truck on a Crawford County road gives up 6,720 lb of gross before it meets a posting at all, and which roads carry the designation was not established here. Local authorities may set lesser limits again, and seasonal restrictions are administered county by county rather than as one state season.

One more limit follows the load rather than the road: 800 lb per inch of tire width, loaded or empty, which a dense load reaches on a short deck length rather than spread down a trailer.

Ind. Code § 9-20-4-1; local limits under § 9-20-1-4 and § 9-20-7-2. Information, not legal advice.

Beyond the weight rules, the paperwork is one sentence: we need a title unless the truck is old enough that it never had one.

Everything after that sentence 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.

Indiana brands a vehicle salvage where repair to a roadworthy state would cost more than 70 per cent of its fair market value immediately before the damage, and the statute names semitrailers explicitly, so a trailer can carry a brand independently of the tractor. Rebuilding requires a state police officer to verify ownership of the major component parts and the source of those parts — a paperwork audit rather than a condition inspection, and a rebuild done without receipts cannot pass it.

Ind. Code § 9-22-3-3 and § 9-22-3. Information, not legal advice.

None of that narrows what we will look at. Dump trucks and aggregate haulers, farm trucks and grain hauls, day cabs and road tractors, flatbeds, rollbacks, tankers, 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 a Crawford 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. The Cape Sandy gate 2.54 miles out, the county roads that reach it and the crossings 1.52 miles along them are where most of it turns 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.
• The truck has been running part loaded for years. Does that count against it?No. On a network where the usable cap is 12.6 tonnes it is the ordinary way to work, and a truck that has spent its life part loaded on Crawford County roads is not a worse truck for it.
• Will you come out this far down the river?Often we don’t need to — plenty of these we buy remotely and arrange the tow, so nobody has to be standing at the gate. All of Crawford County either way, the Cape Sandy end 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.

Those answers matter down here because the reasons are ordinary and the nearest buyer is a long way off. Retiring. A medical that went the wrong way. A pit contract ending. A truck standing behind a barn since somebody stopped driving it, costing insurance every month it does not turn a wheel.

Around Crawford County, and on the roads between Alton and the Cape Sandy gate 2.54 miles out, there is usually one waiting.

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.