We buy trucks in Bloomington

Seven mining operations are attached to Bloomington, and the split between them is the whole story of what a truck does here. Five work dimension limestone: Independent Limestone with 48 employees, Victor Underground with 18, Adams Quarry with 15, Arlington Hills with 11 and Hoadley Portable with 7. Two work crushed stone — the Bloomington Underground Mine with 26 and the Ingram Road Quarry with 8.

Those five are cutting the Salem limestone belt of Monroe and Lawrence counties, the stone sold as Indiana or Bedford limestone and used on a large share of American monumental architecture. Blocks come out in large regular shapes for milling, so what the trailer has to accommodate is block dimension rather than weight alone — a different constraint from a crushed load, and a different one again from a granite monument block.

Two of the operators are one operator. The mine records carry both “IN Limestone Co” and “Indiana Limestone Co”, which are two spellings of the same firm; Polycor merged with the 92-year-old Indiana Limestone Company in October 2018 and keeps the name as a legacy brand. And one of the seven is underground, which changes the rules for anyone driving into it: the federal training regime for underground mines and their surface areas is a different part of the code from the one governing the surface pits around it.

Both of those readings point the same way about where the trucks go. Monroe County’s own government publishes a heritage record of the district’s mills and quarries, so the quarry-to-mill leg happens inside the district — finishing at home, unlike districts where blocks leave raw and are cut elsewhere.

Beyond the mill, one published figure gives the shape of the outbound move: about 30 per cent of the limestone from Indiana Limestone’s four Indiana quarries is sold outside the Midwest. Read as freight, roughly seven-tenths of the district’s output stays regional, so the traffic is predominantly a regional flatbed market rather than long haul or export. That figure was published in 2019 and it is dated; it is the only one on file.

The roads under all of it are mild by Indiana standards. Within ten miles of the underground mine the federal bridge inventory records 211 structures with nine coded below legal loads, 4.3 per cent, all nine county-maintained, and a commercial floor of 17.9 metric tonnes — about 6.9 tonnes of stone over the tare of an empty tandem dump. Monroe County maintains 160 bridges and posts eight of them. The Ingram Road side is tighter, with seventeen restrictions out of 191 and the nearest 1.40 miles out.

FHWA National Bridge Inventory 2025, Indiana file, items 41, 64 and 70. Output share: WFYI, 2019.

Those bridge figures sit underneath a statute that is built the same way — by road rather than by cargo.

Indiana sets gross weight at 80,000 lb, single axles at 20,000 and tandems at 34,000, on the heavy-duty network the state highway agency designates. Off that network gross falls to 73,280 lb and tandems fall to 16,000. Which roads are designated was not established here, so nothing on this page says whether a particular quarry road qualifies.

A second limit matters more to stone than to most freight: 800 lb per inch of tire width, loaded or empty. A dense load arrives on a short deck length rather than spread down a trailer, so tyre specification can decide legality here and not merely longevity. On a block load, where the deck is chosen for dimension, check it twice.

Local authorities may impose lesser limits on their own roads, and seasonal restrictions are administered by county and municipal highway departments rather than as one state season. Whether the southern limestone counties impose frost restrictions at all was not established, and this page does not assert it either way.

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 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 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 — which matters on a flatbed operation, because the trailer can carry a brand of its own independently of the tractor. Rebuilding then requires a state police officer to verify ownership of the major component parts used and the source of those parts, so a rebuild done without the parts trail cannot be retitled here.

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

None of that narrows what we will look at. Flatbeds, day cabs and road tractors, dump trucks and aggregate haulers, lowboys behind them, 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 Monroe 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 Salem Limestone belt quarries, the mill runs and the county roads out towards Ingram Road Quarry 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.
• It hauled block. Is that harder to sell on?No. Block work out of Adams Quarry or Victor Underground tends to mean a heavy deck and a hard life on the suspension rather than high mileage, so tell us the hours and what it carried and we will ask about the right things.
• Do you buy the trailer as well?Tell us what you have, anywhere in Monroe County or the belt around it. Note that Indiana can brand a semitrailer separately from the tractor, so the two can have different paperwork histories.

Those questions come up because the reasons for selling are mostly personal. Retiring. A medical that went the wrong way. Work that dried up when a contract ended. A truck standing at the back of a yard since somebody stopped driving it, costing insurance every month it does not turn a wheel.

Around Monroe County, and out towards Ingram Road Quarry, there is usually one standing in a yard somewhere.

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.