We buy trucks in Newburgh

The industrial node attached to Newburgh is the aluminium smelter at Warrick Operations, and the first thing to say about it is a naming point that misleads people who work around it. The row is recorded as the Evansville smelter. It sits in Warrick County, 13.4 miles east of Evansville, which is in Vanderburgh County. The county field is right; the name is old industry usage rather than a location.

Its coordinate lies 4.47 miles from the middle of Newburgh. Whatever it is called on paper, this is the Warrick County plant, and the traffic it generates runs on Warrick County roads.

That plant has changed size repeatedly, and each change put a different number of trucks on those roads.

It opened about 1960 with five potlines and a rated capacity of 269,000 tonnes a year. Alcoa permanently closed the smelter in March 2016, cutting 600 jobs, while the rolling mill and the power plant carried on with about 1,200 workers. Three of the five potlines were restarted across 2017 and 2018 at 161,400 tonnes a year, and a power outage in May 2018 shut one of the three again. In July 2022 one of the operating potlines was curtailed, taking the rated capacity below 110,000 tonnes a year.

Ownership split in April 2021: Alcoa sold the rolling mill to Kaiser Aluminum but kept the smelter, the power plant and the land, with the mill taking a long-term ground lease and a molten metal supply agreement. Two companies on one site, and a haulage pattern that has been reshaped four times in a decade.

None of that is about your truck directly. It is about why a lot of good equipment in this area has an odd working history behind it — contracts that started, stopped and started again.

Alcoa Corporation announcements 2017, 2021 and 2022; Indianapolis Business Journal, January 2016.

Whichever of those contracts a truck ran on, it ran under the same state ceiling, and Indiana keys that ceiling 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. A truck on an undesignated county road therefore starts 6,720 lb below the federal gross.

Which Warrick County roads carry the heavy-duty designation was not established here. It may be made by the state or by a local authority, and no consolidated list of the local designations was found. Local authorities may also 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 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. Day cabs and road tractors, flatbeds and dump trucks, aggregate haulers, 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 Warrick 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 roads round the Warrick County plant 4.47 miles from town, and the yards and shops that grew up to serve it, 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 sat through a shutdown and never went back to work.That is a common history here after 2016, and standing is its own kind of wear rather than a disqualification. What matters is whether it is all there. We read the truck rather than the hours.
• Do you actually come to Newburgh?Often we don’t need to — plenty of these we buy remotely and arrange the tow, so nobody has to be at a gate 4.47 miles out. All of Warrick County either way, and across into Vanderburgh 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 — and around here that has happened on a schedule set by somebody else more than once. A truck standing beside a shop, costing insurance every month it does not turn a wheel.

Across the 4.47 miles between the town and the Warrick County plant, and out on the roads towards Vanderburgh County, 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.