We buy trucks in Montpelier

The node attached to Montpelier is the IMI Montpelier Quarry, worked by IMI Aggregates, and the federal mine regulator records six employees at it. Its coordinate lies 0.82 miles from the centre of the city, which is about as close as a working pit gets to a town in this research.

Ten miles out from that gate the Indiana bridge file returns 129 structures, of which fourteen are coded below legal loads and all fourteen are county-maintained. The nearest is 1.55 miles away.

Those fourteen come with a contradiction that has to be explained rather than smoothed over, because both halves of it come out of the same federal file.

Blackford County, which is the county this quarry is filed to, maintains 58 bridges and posts none of them at all. Zero. Yet fourteen county-maintained crossings inside ten miles of the pit are coded below legal loads. Both statements are true and they are not about the same thing: one is a jurisdiction and the other is a circle.

A ten-mile radius drawn at Montpelier does not stay inside Blackford. It reaches into Grant, Jay and Wells, and those county tiers do post their bridges. So a truck working out of this pit can spend its whole life in a county with no postings on its own inventory and still meet fourteen restricted crossings inside a ten-mile drive, simply by going a few miles in the wrong direction.

Of those fourteen the lowest operating rating is 17.3 metric tonnes, about 19.1 US tons. Against the 11.0 tonnes of an empty tandem dump that leaves roughly 6.3 tonnes for the stone — a real part load, and more than most circles in this research allow.

FHWA National Bridge Inventory 2025, Indiana file, items 21, 41, 64 and 70. County-maintained counts are measured inside the ten-mile circle; the posting rate is measured across the county the node is filed to.

That crossing between one county and the next matters more here because of how the statute is written: 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.

Designation may be made by the state or by a local authority, county by county, and no consolidated list of the local ones was found. On a route that leaves Blackford and enters Grant, Jay or Wells within a few miles, that is not an abstract point: the ceiling can change with the jurisdiction and there is no single document that says where.

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 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, 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 Blackford County speciality — they are everywhere. They are on the list because we buy them here too.

Whatever you drive, the offer doesn’t change. The IMI Montpelier gate 0.82 miles out, the town roads it feeds onto and the county lines a few miles past them 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 only ever run local.With the IMI Montpelier gate 0.82 miles from the middle of town, a lot of trucks here never leave the short routes. Short hops and a lot of them put hours and brake cycles ahead of the miles, and we read the truck rather than the dash.
• Do you actually come to Montpelier?Often we don’t need to — plenty of these we buy remotely and arrange the tow, so nobody has to be at the yard. All of Blackford County either way, and across the Grant, Jay and Wells lines with it. 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 because the reason for the call is usually not the truck. Retiring. A medical that went the wrong way. A hauling contract ending. A truck standing beside a shed since somebody stopped driving it, costing insurance every month it does not turn a wheel.

Within the 0.82 miles between the town and the IMI Montpelier gate, and out across the Blackford County roads, 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. That’s what we’re here for.