We buy trucks in Eminence

There are fourteen structures within ten miles of the quarry here. That is the joint thinnest count of any operation in this entire body of research, level with one in Breckinridge County, Kentucky. The next thinnest are twenty at Seligman over in the Missouri Ozarks and twenty-seven on the Cumberland Plateau in Tennessee. The densest is 737, up at Kansas City.

Two of the fourteen are rated below legal loads, neither of them county-maintained, and the nearest is 4.61 miles out. The lowest rating among them is 15.4 metric tonnes, about 17 US tons, which admits roughly 4.4 tonnes of stone over the tare of an empty tandem dump — about a sixth of a legal load.

Shannon County itself maintains only eighteen bridges against forty-two maintained by the state, so it falls below the threshold used for county comparison and cannot be ranked at all. The county figure is not the measure here; the ten-mile count is, and it is fourteen.

A network that thin is not simply a harder version of a dense one. It is a different problem, because the routes are topologically few — haulage is defined first by which way out exists, and only then by what each crossing on that way will take.

Everywhere else in this lane a driver picks among routes and avoids the weak ones. Here there may be one way to a given job, and the question is whether the load goes whole, part loaded, or not at all.

The operation is small to match: 4 employees, and its coordinates lie 0.07 miles from the middle of the town — the second-tightest fit between a record and its place anywhere in this lane, behind only Gilliam Quarry up in Saline County at 0.04 miles, which after seventy pages of caveats is worth noting.

For a machine that means low mileage on few roads, a lot of it loaded, and wear concentrated in the driveline rather than spread over highway miles. You will know better than we do what that does over a few years. Shannon County is small enough that most of it is the same few roads.

What each crossing will take is one limit; the statute is the other, and it applies wherever the road goes.

Missouri sets gross weight at 80,000 lb, a single axle at 20,000 lb and a tandem at 34,000 lb, and it keeps the federal ceiling in place by providing that nothing in the section allows a load heavier than Title 23 of the United States Code does.

Then subsection 6 does something none of the other states on file do for this trade. Any vehicle or combination running on highways other than the interstate system may go over the single-axle, tandem-axle and gross limits by up to two thousand pounds — and that allowance names no commodity at all. Everywhere else the relief is written for somebody in particular. Tennessee’s ten per cent names sand, coal, clay, shale and phosphate, and leaves crushed stone out. Kentucky’s names crushed stone first. Alabama gives nobody anything. Missouri gives everybody two thousand pounds once you are off the interstate, which at 80,000 lb is about two and a half per cent.

One thing in that section is genuinely unsettled and we are not going to tidy it up. Subsection 6 says the allowance may be taken against the gross limit. Subsection 3’s own 80,000 lb cap is written as subject to subsections 9, 10, 12, 13 and 14, and it does not name subsection 6. Both texts are on the books, and how they work together is not something the research resolved.

The commodity allowances Missouri does write are all built the same way and all stop in the same place. Grain and grain co-products may run ten per cent over during harvest; milk and livestock may reach 85,500 lb; local log trucks reach 109,600 lb. Every one of them applies only on highways other than the interstate system. That is not a quirk of Missouri drafting. Title 23 caps the Interstate System at 80,000 lb and no state can raise it, so any state allowance above 80,000 lb has to live off the interstate by construction. The state route is the loaded road and the interstate is the empty one.

One more thing separates Missouri from its neighbours: it prices an overload rather than stopping it. The fine runs by the pound on a rising scale — two cents for each pound of the first five hundred, five cents to a thousand, ten cents above that. What the section does not carry is a do-not-move rule. Tennessee makes it separately unlawful to move an overloaded truck until the load comes off, so an overweight truck there stops where it stands. Missouri lets it carry on and sends a bill. Those are different risks, and over a few years they produce different loading habits and a differently worn truck.

RSMo §§ 304.180 and 304.240; 23 U.S.C. § 127. Information, not legal advice.

Beyond weight, the paperwork comes down to a single 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. Both are ordinary and neither one stops a sale.

Missouri’s salvage rule is worth a minute because it reaches almost nothing in the stock we buy. A vehicle is branded salvage only where the cost of repairs exceeds eighty per cent of the fair market value immediately before the damage, and where the damage happened no more than six years after the manufacturer’s model year designation. Both limbs have to be met, not either one.

Both numbers are outliers, and they pull the same way. Eighty per cent is the highest threshold on file — Kentucky, Alabama and Tennessee all brand at seventy-five. Six model years is the shortest age window found anywhere; Arkansas runs seven and Tennessee ten. Past that window the Missouri rule does not reach a vehicle at all, however badly it was damaged. For a used commercial truck the age limb is nearly always the operative one and the percentage nearly never is.

The repair side leaves out more here than in any other state on file: inflatable safety restraints, tires, sound systems, damage from hail, and sales tax on parts and materials. Kentucky excludes airbag reinstallation and nothing else. Two states can share a threshold and still be adding up different repair bills.

Where the brand does land, Missouri applies it on the way out rather than on the way in. A salvage vehicle is retitled only after an examination recorded on Form 551, carried out by an inspector of the Missouri State Highway Patrol or by the St. Louis city or county auto theft unit, and that certificate runs out six months from the date of inspection. The title issued afterwards carries the words PRIOR SALVAGE. Minnesota uses the same two words for the opposite end of the process, branding on acquisition; the same phrase means an incoming obligation in one state and an outgoing designation in the other.

RSMo § 301.010; Missouri Department of Revenue Form 551. Information, not legal advice, and only as current as the date the rule was last checked.

All of that is equipment we buy. Dump trucks and aggregate haulers off the stone. Farm trucks and grain hauls off the country around it. Day cabs, road tractors, flatbeds, rollbacks, box trucks, straight trucks, service bodies, and the work trucks and pickups that go with a crew. Around the Crider Brothers quarry, and across Shannon County and Carter County, this town turns over a steady amount of it.

Whatever you drive, the offer doesn’t change. We buy all of them. This far into the hills the straightest route is usually that we buy it remotely and arrange the tow, with nobody making the drive. We can also come to you and drive it away, or come and tow it.

• 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.
• There is really only one way in and out of some of these jobs.That matches the data — fourteen structures within ten miles is the thinnest network we have measured anywhere. It makes the question whether a load goes whole or part loaded, rather than which way round to send it.
• Mine did low miles but hard ones.Say so. Few roads and most of them loaded puts the wear into the driveline rather than spreading it over highway miles, and an odometer will not show that.
• 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. Neither one stops a sale.
• Will you really come out this far?We will, and often we do not need to. We can buy it remotely and arrange the tow with nobody visiting at all, or come to you and drive it away, or come and tow it.
• How far out do you come?All of Shannon County and the ones around it, Carter County and Reynolds County included. Distance has never stopped a sale.
• How do you pay?Cash or electronic payment, at pickup.

Beyond a contract ending, the reasons are mostly personal ones. Retiring. A medical that went the wrong way. A partnership splitting and the equipment with it. A truck that stopped earning and has been sitting since, where every month it sits is another month of insurance on something that isn’t turning a wheel.

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. Across Shannon County and Dent County there is usually one sitting.