We buy trucks in Oolitic

Three dimension-stone workings are attached to Oolitic. One reports 17 employees, one 13 and works underground, and one 6 under a local construction firm. All three cut the Salem limestone belt of Lawrence and Monroe counties — the stone sold as Indiana or Bedford limestone.

The first of them supplied the stone for the Empire State Building: 200,000 cubic feet of it. That is a project total from the 1930s and not a production rate, and it is not used as one here. It is on the page because it says what kind of stone this is and what kind of trailer has always been needed to move it.

One correction is worth making because it runs the other way from most. Secondary sources routinely place that quarry “in Bloomington”. The record places it here, in Lawrence County, and an independent coordinate check agrees — Bloomington is in Monroe. On this one the data is more precise than the popular account, which is not the usual direction of error in this project.

Those blocks come out of the ground in large regular shapes for milling, and that is the fact that decides what hauls them. What the trailer has to accommodate is the dimension of the block rather than its weight alone — a different problem from a crushed load, and a different one again from a granite monument block.

The milling happens locally. Monroe County, up the road, publishes a heritage record of the district’s mills and quarries, so the quarry-to-mill leg stays inside the district rather than leaving raw for finishing elsewhere. That means short, heavy, awkward loads on local roads before anything gets on a highway.

Beyond the mill, one published figure gives the shape of the outbound move: about 30 per cent of the limestone from this operator’s four Indiana quarries, the Empire Quarry among them, is sold outside the Midwest, so roughly seven-tenths of it stays regional. Read as freight that is a regional flatbed market rather than long haul or export. The figure was published in 2019 and it is dated; it is the only one on file.

One of the three workings is underground, which changes the rules for anyone driving into it: the federal training regime covering underground mines and their surface areas is a different part of the code from the one governing the surface pits alongside.

Those local legs run under a statute keyed to the road rather than to the cargo.

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 that network gross falls to 73,280 lb and tandems fall from 34,000 to 16,000. Which roads are designated was not established here, so nothing on this page says whether a particular mill road qualifies.

A second limit matters more to cut stone than to almost anything else: 800 lb per inch of tire width, loaded or empty. A block is dense and sits on a short length of deck rather than spread down a trailer, and on a deck chosen for dimension rather than for spread, that limit can decide legality rather than merely wear.

Local authorities may impose lesser limits again, and seasonal restrictions are administered county by county. Whether the southern limestone counties impose frost restrictions at all was not established and is not asserted either way.

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. Rebuilding requires a state police officer to verify ownership of the major component parts used and the source of those parts — a paperwork audit rather than a condition inspection, which a rebuild done without receipts cannot pass.

Ind. Code § 9-22-3-3 and § 9-22-3. Information, not legal advice.

None of that narrows what we will look at. Flatbeds and lowboys, dump trucks and aggregate haulers, day cabs and road tractors, 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 Lawrence 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 belt quarries, the mill roads and the Empire Quarry end of the district 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.
• Do you come out to the belt towns?Often we don’t need to — a lot of these we buy remotely and arrange the tow. We also come to you and drive it away, come to you and tow it, or take it if you drive it to us.
• The deck is beaten up from block work. Does that matter?Tell us about it. A worn deck is ordinary on block work out of the Empire Quarry district and it is not what decides a sale — whether the truck is complete is.
• Do you buy the trailer too?Tell us what you have, anywhere in Lawrence County and the belt towns around it. Indiana can brand a semitrailer separately from the tractor, so the two may have different paperwork histories even though they always worked together.

Those questions come up because the reasons for selling are mostly personal. Retiring. A medical that went the wrong way. A mill contract that ended. A truck standing at the edge of a yard since somebody stopped driving it, costing insurance every month it does not turn a wheel.

Around Lawrence County there is usually one waiting, and a good few of them have hauled off the Empire Quarry road at some point.

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.