We buy trucks in Fort Wayne

Four rows are attached to Fort Wayne: the Ardmore Stone Quarry, which reports 40 employees to the federal mine regulator, and three rail yards, all within about five miles of the centre of town.

The yards need reading rather than listing. East Wayne is a Norfolk Southern yard whose recorded coordinate actually falls inside New Haven, a city with a page of its own. The yard simply called Fort Wayne belongs to the Chicago, Fort Wayne & Eastern Railroad, not to the big carrier the name suggests. And Triple Crown carries the name of a service that no longer exists.

That last one needs a sentence. Triple Crown Services was Norfolk Southern’s RoadRailer operation, hubbed here and serving thirteen cities. The network was cut back in 2015 to a single pair of trains, and the last RoadRailer trains ran over the weekend of 24 to 25 August 2024, replaced by container service between Toledo and Kansas City. The row was checked after that date, so the name is a naming artifact and not stale data. What the yard handles now was not established, and this page does not guess.

Those yards and that quarry sit in a road environment that looks nothing like the one two hours south. Within ten miles of the Ardmore quarry the federal bridge inventory records 318 structures, twenty-nine of them coded below legal loads — 9.1 per cent — and all twenty-nine are county-maintained. Allen County maintains 405 bridges, the largest county network in this batch, and posts 67 of them, 16.5 per cent.

Set that against Indianapolis, where 769 structures produce twenty-three restrictions of which six belong to the county. The difference is governmental, not geological. Indianapolis consolidated its county government and Fort Wayne did not, so Allen County still maintains the bridges around its own city while Marion County maintains five in total.

Both cities carry the same cap where a restriction bites: 13.6 metric tonnes, which over the 11.0-tonne tare of an empty tandem dump admits about 2.6 tonnes of stone. So the two largest markets in Indiana differ by roughly a factor of five in how often a truck meets a restriction, and not at all in what it can carry when it does. The nearest restricted crossing to the quarry is 3.60 miles out.

FHWA National Bridge Inventory 2025, Indiana file, items 41, 64 and 70.

That county-by-county pattern sits on top of a statute built the same way.

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 it, gross falls to 73,280 lb and tandems fall to 16,000. A truck on an undesignated county road therefore starts 6,720 lb below the federal gross before it ever meets a posted bridge, and in Allen County posted bridges are not rare.

Local authorities may set lower limits again on their own roads, and seasonal restrictions are county-administered rather than statewide. Which roads sit on the designated list was not established by this research. A separate limit catches dense freight: 800 lb per inch of tire width, loaded or empty, which stone and steel reach on a short deck.

Read as wear, that arithmetic is why hours matter as much as miles here. A lower legal load means more trips for the same tonnage, and more trips means more loading cycles, more brake applications and more engine hours behind the same odometer reading.

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. The rebuilt route then requires a state police officer to inspect the vehicle and verify ownership of the major component parts used and the source of those parts — an audit of paperwork rather than of condition. A rebuild done without keeping 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. Day cabs and road tractors, dump trucks and aggregate haulers, flatbeds, sleepers, rollbacks, car haulers, 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 an Allen 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. Allen County work, the New Haven side and the roads out of the city 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 spent its life on county roads. Does that matter?It changes what we ask about. More trips for the same tonnage means hours, brakes and suspension tell you more than the odometer does. Say so and we will ask the right questions.
• Do you come out to New Haven and the county?Yes — all of Allen County, New Haven 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 questions come up because the reasons for selling are mostly personal. Retiring. A medical that went the wrong way. A contract that ended. A truck parked at the back of a yard since somebody stopped driving it, costing insurance every month it does not turn a wheel.

Across Allen County and out through New Haven, the same trucks come up for sale for the same reasons.

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.