We buy trucks in Cayuga

The node here is a clay and shale pit and plant whose coordinate lies 0.59 miles from the Cayuga centroid — not near the town, in it. What stood on it was the Colonial Brick Corporation works, and it is worth saying at the front that it is not running: the Swartz family closed it in 2015 and put it up for sale the following year.

Fifty acres, worked from a 25-foot seam of red-burning shale lying over an 8-foot seam of buff-burning clay. Ten original beehive kilns banded with metal, and a grinder building. The bricks were cut with antique equipment and laid by hand.

The reason given for closing was scale. Colonial made about 12 million bricks a year against modern plants at 140 million, and no amount of craft closes a gap of that size.

That closure is the reason this page exists rather than a footnote to it. When a works of this kind stops, the plant is what gets advertised and the equipment is what gets left: the dumps that moved shale from the pit to the grinder, the flatbeds that took pallets out, the pickups and service bodies that kept both going.

those hauls were short by design. On the Colonial Brick Corporation site the raw material travels essentially no distance — pit to kiln is often yards — while the finished brick is what covered ground, out to something like 150 miles.

So the trucks that served it fall into two kinds, and both are worth a call: short-cycle pit equipment with high hours against modest miles, and road equipment that carried the product out.

Whatever it carried, the truck ran under one statute, and Indiana keys its weight 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 Vermillion 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, flatbeds, farm trucks and grain hauls, day cabs and road tractors, 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 Vermillion 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 Colonial Brick Corporation ground 0.59 miles from the middle of town, the farms around it and the roads out towards the river 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 has not moved since the plant shut.That is exactly the truck we expect to find here. Ten years standing is not a disqualifier — a missing driveline is. Flat tyres, a dead battery and a seized brake are ordinary and we plan for them.
• Will you come out to a village this size?Often we don’t need to — plenty of these we buy remotely and arrange the tow, so nobody has to be standing on the old Colonial Brick Corporation ground to sell what is parked on it. All of Vermillion 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 here more than most places, because the biggest reason in this town already happened. A works closed, and what it used is still standing behind sheds and along fence lines 0.59 miles from the middle of Cayuga.

The rest are the ordinary ones. Retiring. A medical that went the wrong way. A farm changing hands. A truck costing insurance every month it does not turn a wheel, anywhere across Vermillion County.

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.