We buy trucks in Indianapolis

Five mining operations are attached to Indianapolis in the research, and four of them are stone. The Kentucky Avenue Mine reports 40 employees to the federal mine regulator and Harding Street Quarry-Surface 43, and the two sit four miles apart. North of the city a second pair reports 42 and 23 — one coded surface, one coded underground, on effectively the same point, which is the only field that tells them apart.

The fifth is not stone. Riverside Aggregates & Materials runs an industrial sand operation with 4 employees inside the city limits, which is an unusual place to find one. A flour mill carried under Cargill’s name makes six rows in all.

That is a working aggregate market inside a metropolitan one, and the two together are most of what puts a heavy truck on the road here.

Those quarries sit in the busiest bridge environment this research has found anywhere. The federal bridge inventory for 2025 records 769 structures within ten miles of the Kentucky Avenue Mine and 753 within ten miles of Harding Street — the densest and third densest of roughly 1,300 sites measured across twelve states, ahead of Plymouth Meeting in Pennsylvania at 757.

What is missing from that count is the part that matters. Marion County maintains five bridges out of the 769, and posts none of them. Indianapolis and Marion County are a consolidated city-county, so the city holds the network a county holds everywhere else in Indiana — and statewide, counties maintain 12,676 of the 19,542 structures on file, about two in three.

So restrictions here are rare and hard rather than common and mild. Twenty-three of the 769 are coded below legal loads and twenty-two of the 753, around three per cent either way, and only six and seven of those belong to the county. Both floors land at 13.6 metric tonnes. Against the 11.0-tonne tare of an empty tandem dump that leaves room for roughly 2.6 tonnes of stone, so a truck that meets one of them crosses close to empty or not at all.

North of the city the pattern changes again. The two quarries up there sit on 606 and 604 structures with eleven restrictions each, and Hamilton County maintains 339 bridges and posts two of them — 0.6 per cent, the least-posted county on file alongside Adams. Set that beside Crawford County in southern Indiana, which posts 41 of the 78 it maintains, and the same statute produces a binding crossing about fifteen times as often there as here. Hamilton is the fastest-growing county in the state and its bridges are new. Crawford’s are not.

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

Both of those readings sit on top of one statute, and which way it cuts matters here.

Indiana sets gross weight at 80,000 lb, a single axle at 20,000 and a tandem at 34,000 — but only on the heavy-duty network the state highway agency designates. Off that network the gross figure falls to 73,280 lb and tandems fall from 34,000 to 16,000, less than half. Most states key the allowance to what you are hauling. Indiana keys it to which road you are on.

There is a third layer under both. Local authorities may impose lesser limits on any road or bridge of their own, and seasonal restrictions are administered county by county rather than as one state season. Which roads are on the designated list was not something this research could establish, so nothing here says whether a particular route qualifies.

The consequence for a truck is arithmetic. A lower legal load means more trips for the same tonnage — more loading cycles, more brake applications, more hours, for the same reading on the odometer. It is why we ask about hours as readily as miles on anything that worked off-network.

One more limit catches dense freight specifically: 800 lb per inch of tire width, loaded or empty. Stone reaches that on a short deck length rather than spread down a trailer, so on a stone truck the tyre specification can decide legality and not just wear.

Ind. Code § 9-20-4-1; local limits under § 9-20-1-4 and § 9-20-7-2. Information, not legal advice, and only as current as the date the state rule file was last verified.

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. Both are ordinary and neither stops a sale.

Two Indiana rules are worth knowing before you spend anything on a damaged truck. The state brands a vehicle salvage where repairing it 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 of its own, independently of the tractor pulling it.

The rebuilt route has a condition most states do not impose. A state police officer inspects the vehicle and verifies both ownership of the major component parts used and the source of those parts. That is a paperwork audit rather than a condition inspection, and a rebuild done without keeping the parts trail cannot be retitled here. Better to know that before the work starts than after 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, mixers, 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 Marion 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 runs, the city work and the corridors out to Hamilton County 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 ran quarry work. Does that count against it?No. It changes what we ask about — hours, loading cycles, brakes and suspension rather than just the odometer. Tell us what it did and we will ask the right questions.
• Do you have to come out to look at it?Not necessarily. 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. Marion County and the Hamilton County side are the same 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 and did not get replaced. A truck sitting behind a shop since somebody stopped driving it, costing insurance every month it does not turn a wheel.

Across Marion County, and out over the Hamilton County line, 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.