We buy trucks in Portage

Two rows are attached to Portage. One is a crushed-stone operation with 11 employees, 3.56 miles from the middle of town. The other is a Norfolk Southern rail yard 2.58 miles out, inside the city, carrying the name of the steel district on Lake Michigan.

That name is where a page could easily go wrong, so here is the limit of it: whether the yard serves a steel mill was not determined, and no mill is named in the record. A name is not a customer list. What actually moves through it could not be established from any source read.

What the name does support is one general point, and it is a useful one for anyone selling a truck that worked round here.

That point is about the wheel rather than the axle. Steel is dense freight, and dense freight reaches Indiana’s limit of 800 lb per inch of tire width on a short length of deck rather than spread down a trailer — so on that kind of load tyre specification can decide legality rather than only longevity.

It is a different constraint from the one most people think of. An axle limit is about how the weight is distributed along the vehicle; a wheel-weight limit is about what is under each tyre, and a heavy compact load can satisfy the first while failing the second.

Around the Porter County stone gate the road network is not the problem. The federal bridge inventory records 236 structures within ten miles with four coded below legal loads, all county-maintained, the nearest 3.68 miles off, and a commercial floor of 21.1 metric tonnes — about 10.1 tonnes of stone over an empty tandem’s tare, a good part load. Under that floor the raw minimum is 6.8 tonnes, which no commercial vehicle crosses at all.

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

Those four restrictions sit under a statute that is itself keyed to the road rather than to the cargo, which is the unusual part of Indiana law.

Gross weight is 80,000 lb, single axles 20,000 and tandems 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, less than half. Which roads carry the designation was not established here.

Local authorities may impose lesser limits again on their own roads and bridges, and seasonal restrictions are administered county by county rather than as one state season. Northern counties in this state are plausible frost-law territory; whether Porter County imposes anything of the kind was not established and is not asserted either way.

Read as wear rather than as law, a lower legal load means more trips for the same tonnage, so hours and loading cycles run ahead of the odometer on anything that worked off the designated network.

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. Dump trucks and aggregate haulers, day cabs and road tractors, flatbeds, tankers, rollbacks, car haulers, 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 Porter 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 stone gate 3.56 miles out, the Lake Michigan district beyond it and the county roads between 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 hauled steel rather than stone.Same answer, and the same wheel limit applies — dense freight on a short deck, as it does for anything moving out of the Lake Michigan district. Tell us about the tyres and the suspension as well as the driveline.
• Do you cover the rest of Porter County?Yes, all of it and the towns around 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 questions come up because the reasons for selling are mostly personal. Retiring. A medical that went the wrong way. A contract that ended when a mill’s order book did. A truck standing at the back of a lot since somebody stopped driving it, costing insurance every month it does not turn a wheel.

Around Porter County, and out towards the Lake Michigan district, 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 by the end of the week. That’s what we’re here for.