We buy trucks in Sellersburg

Five rows are attached to Sellersburg and they describe one industry with two halves. Three crushed-stone quarries sit within about four miles of each other — IMI Sellersburg Stone with 24 employees, Coopers Lane Mine with 16 and Aggrock with 10. Alongside them the cement works at Speed carries two rows on the same coordinate, the plant and its clay mine, which is how two of the four Indiana cement works in the research are recorded.

Those plants have moved through the same corporate history. Essroc is now Heidelberg Materials, and the name appears on four of the six cement rows in the state; Lehigh Portland Cement at Mitchell belongs to the same family, Lehigh Hanson having become Heidelberg too. The operator names on the rows are older than the ownership.

The number that matters most here is not a mine number at all. Sellersburg is 11.0 miles from Louisville, and that proximity shapes everything below.

That short haul into a metropolitan market shows up in the road data as almost no constraint whatsoever. The three quarries sit on 227, 226 and 269 structures within ten miles with two restrictions apiece — 0.9, 0.9 and 0.7 per cent, the lowest counts measured anywhere in Indiana. Clark County maintains 147 bridges and posts six.

All three carry a commercial floor of 42.9 metric tonnes. A legal 80,000 lb truck grosses 36.3, so the tightest usable crossing near each of these gates sits about six tonnes above a full legal load — both restricted crossings take a loaded truck without a second thought. Charlestown Quarry eight miles north carries the same figure, so four Clark County sites share one cap.

Those circles also cross a state line, which is why they are computed from every state file inside the radius rather than from Indiana alone. Around Coopers Lane, 245 of the 471 structures within ten miles are Kentucky’s. The crossing that sets the floor at each of the three gates is a Kentucky record between eight and nine miles out.

So what binds a truck here is the statute rather than the road. Read the floor as an upper bound in any case: it is a minimum inside a ten-mile circle, and at about two-thirds of the sites measured a tighter crossing lies between ten miles and twenty.

FHWA National Bridge Inventory 2025, read as a union across every state inside the radius, items 41, 64 and 70.

That statute is keyed to which road a truck is on rather than to what it is carrying, which is unusual.

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 it, gross falls to 73,280 lb and tandems fall to 16,000. Whether these particular roads are designated is not published, so a truck working out of Sellersburg may be running 6,720 lb below the federal gross without anything on the roadside saying so.

Crossing the state line changes the question rather than answering it. Kentucky grants its weight tolerance by commodity, and the list in its statute includes concrete but not cement — two products from the same plant on opposite sides of the line. A dense load also meets Indiana’s wheel limit of 800 lb per inch of tire width, loaded or empty, which stone and clinker reach on a short deck.

The wear reading here is metropolitan rather than rural: short repeated hauls into the Louisville market, so brakes, clutch, suspension and tyres age ahead of the engine, with essentially no route constraint to slow any of it down.

Ind. Code § 9-20-4-1; KRS 189.222(1)(c) for the Kentucky commodity list. 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 it names semitrailers explicitly, so a trailer can be branded independently of the tractor. The rebuilt route needs a state police officer to verify ownership of the major component parts used and the source of those parts. Two states in a ten-mile radius means two sets of rules, and the one that applies is the one where the truck is titled.

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

None of that narrows what we will look at. Mixers, dump trucks and aggregate haulers, day cabs and road tractors, flatbeds, tankers, rollbacks, 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 Clark 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 gates at Coopers Lane and Aggrock, the plant at Speed and the 11.0 miles into Louisville 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.
• The truck is titled in Kentucky. Does that change anything?Not for us. It changes which state’s paperwork applies, and that is the state it is titled in, not the one it is parked in. We cover all of Clark County either way.
• It did short hauls its whole life. Is that better or worse?Just different. Short repeated runs age brakes, clutch and suspension ahead of the engine, so a low odometer can sit on a hard-worked driveline. Tell us what it did.

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

Around Clark County, and on the 11.0 miles across the state line where a lot of this work goes, 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.