We buy trucks in Connersville

Connersville carries two recorded nodes and both of them are local. One is a construction sand and gravel pit worked by IMI Aggregates with four employees, recorded against this town as its own city. The other is a CSX rail yard whose coordinate lies 1.06 miles from the centroid, inside the place rather than attached by a fallback from somewhere else.

Four people at a pit is the smallest kind of working there is, and it means every truck on that gate belongs to somebody else. A yard a mile from the middle of town means the material has somewhere to go that is not a highway.

A loading point and a transload point inside one small town is a short, repetitive haul, and short repetitive hauls are where the equipment round here gets its hours.

That second row is thinner than the first. What the yard actually handles could not be determined from any source read for this research, and this page is not going to guess at it.

The 1.06 miles carries a caveat of its own, too. Rail coordinates here are recorded as the mean of a track polyline rather than as a surveyed point, so the figure runs from the middle of the trackwork to the middle of the town rather than from a gate to a street corner.

What is not in doubt is the shape of the place: a small Fayette County town with an aggregate pit and a rail yard in it, and a truck population that reflects both.

Those hauls run 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 Fayette 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, day cabs and road tractors, flatbeds, farm trucks and grain hauls, 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 Fayette 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 pit gate, the yard 1.06 miles from the middle of town and the streets between the two 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 never went far. Does that hurt it?No, and it is the normal history here. A truck that ran a pit to a yard 1.06 miles away has hours and loading cycles well ahead of its odometer, and we read the truck rather than the dash.
• Will you come out to a town this size?Often we don’t need to — plenty of these we buy remotely and arrange the tow, so nobody has to be standing there. All of Fayette County either way, the pit 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 here because the reasons are ordinary and the nearest buyer is not close. Retiring. A medical that went the wrong way. A business changing hands. A truck standing beside a shed since somebody stopped driving it, costing insurance every month it does not turn a wheel.

Around Fayette County, and within the 1.06 miles between the middle of town and the yard, 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.