We buy trucks in Cloverdale

For a town this size the mining record is unusually full. Five crushed-stone operations are attached to Cloverdale — the 243 Quarry with 25 employees, the ILC Resources Cloverdale Plant with 24, the Putnamville Quarry with 13, the Cloverdale Quarry with 11 and the Putnam Quarry with 9 — all within about four and a half miles of the middle of town.

Those five are part of seven working inside Putnam County under six different operators. That is a genuine aggregate district rather than a single pit, and it means a lot of loaded stone leaving a lot of gates onto the same county road network.

Which is where this page stops being about quarries and starts being about bridges.

That road network is the most restricted one in roughly 1,300 sites measured across twelve states. Putnam County maintains 221 bridges and posts 78 of them — 35.3 per cent, better than one in three.

Read from the quarry gates it is just as stark. Within ten miles of the Putnam Quarry the federal bridge inventory records 199 structures with 52 coded below legal loads; the Cloverdale Quarry and the ILC plant see 47 apiece out of 185; the 243 Quarry 46 of 181; Putnamville 44 of 171. Greencastle, twelve miles off, sees 57 — the highest count published anywhere in this research. Between 25 and 29 per cent of crossings restricted, so roughly one road in four.

Two of those numbers matter more than the counts. Every one of these sites has at least 96 per cent of its restrictions county-maintained, and every one has a raw minimum rating of 2.7 metric tonnes. The lowest crossing a commercial vehicle can legally use runs 11.7 or 13.6 tonnes depending on the gate — over the 11.0-tonne tare of an empty tandem dump, that admits about 0.7 or 2.6 tonnes of stone. A truck that meets the tightest of them keeps a fraction of its load or turns around.

There is one consolation and it is administrative. A single authority owns almost all of it, so a route conversation or a permit reaches the whole network rather than four different offices.

FHWA National Bridge Inventory 2025, Indiana file, items 41, 64 and 70. Bridge ratings record the gross weight of the rating vehicle.

Those postings land on a truck that is already carrying less than it would elsewhere, because the statute underneath is keyed to the road as well.

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 from 34,000 to 16,000. So a truck on an undesignated county road starts 6,720 lb below the federal gross, and then meets a posted bridge on one crossing in four. Which roads are on the designated list was not established here.

Local authorities may impose lesser limits again, and seasonal restrictions are administered county by county rather than as one state season — one published Indiana example requires a daily telephone call between six and ten in the morning to run at all. Whether Putnam County imposes anything of the kind was not established, and this page does not assert that it does or does not.

The wear reading follows directly. A lower legal load means more trips for the same tonnage, so a truck working here piles up loading cycles, brake applications and engine hours faster than the odometer suggests. That is why we ask about hours on anything that ran these roads.

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, 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 used and the source of those parts — a paperwork audit, and one a rebuild done without receipts cannot pass.

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 Putnam 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 quarry roads out to Putnam Quarry and Putnamville Quarry, the farms and the runs out of the county are where most of it turns up.

• Will you actually come out this far?Often we don’t need to. A lot of trucks out here we buy remotely and arrange the tow, so nobody has to be standing in the yard on the day. We do also come to you and drive it away, come to you and tow it, or take it if you’d rather drive it to us.
• 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 only ever ran county roads. Is that a problem?Not at all, and Putnam County roads are most of what we see out here — a lot of it around ILC Resources and the Putnamville Quarry. It changes the questions — hours, brakes, suspension and loading cycles rather than mileage. You know better than we do what those roads did to it over a few years.

Those answers matter more out here because the reasons for selling are the ordinary ones and the nearest buyer is not close. Retiring. A medical that went the wrong way. A quarry contract that ended. A truck parked beside a shed since somebody stopped driving it, costing insurance every month it does not turn a wheel.

Around Putnam County, from Bainbridge Quarry across to Putnamville Quarry, 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.