We buy trucks in Andersonville

The node attached to Andersonville is Derbyshire Quarry, and the federal mine regulator records four employees there. Four is a crew, not a shift pattern: this is a small working, and the trucks that serve it mostly belong to somebody else.

Its coordinate lies 3.90 miles from the centroid of the Andersonville CDP, taking the nearest place of that name, so the pit is out in the county rather than at the end of a street. The road between the two is the thing that matters, and in Franklin County that road is a county road.

A hauler working a pit that size is usually running for a farm, a builder or a township as much as for the quarry itself.

Those county roads are where the constraint lives. Within ten miles of Derbyshire Quarry the Indiana bridge file records 140 structures; 22 are coded posted for load and 23 are coded below legal loads, and every one of the 23 is county-maintained. The nearest is 2.77 miles from the pit.

The lowest operating rating among them is 7.2 metric tonnes, under the 11.0-tonne tare of an empty tandem dump, so nothing commercial crosses that one even empty. The lowest rating that clears the tare is 11.7 tonnes, about 12.9 US tons — a cap that admits roughly 0.7 tonnes of stone on top of the truck.

Seven-tenths of a tonne is a wheelbarrow of the load a legal truck can carry. So the count reads mild at one crossing in six and the consequence is not mild at all, which is the pattern across this state and the reason a bare percentage tells you very little.

FHWA National Bridge Inventory 2025, Indiana file, 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 Franklin 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 Franklin 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 Derbyshire Quarry gate 3.90 miles out, the farm ground between it and the town, and the crossings 2.77 miles along the way 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 spent its life running light over posted bridges.Then it has done fewer tonne-miles and more trips for the same work, which shows up as hours and brake cycles rather than as odometer miles. We read a truck on what is on it, not on the number in the dash.
• Will you come out to a place this small?Often we don’t need to — plenty of these we buy remotely and arrange the tow, so nobody has to be standing at a gate 3.90 miles from town. All of Franklin County either way. 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 out here because the reasons are ordinary and the nearest buyer is a long way off. Retiring. A medical that went the wrong way. A farm changing hands. A truck standing beside a barn since somebody stopped driving it, costing insurance every month it does not turn a wheel.

Around Franklin County, and between the town and the Derbyshire Quarry gate 3.90 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.