Shannon County
Fourteen bridges within ten miles
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.
And that changes what haulage even means here
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.
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 it lies 0.07 miles from the middle of the town.
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.
Around the Crider Brothers quarry, and across Shannon County and Carter County, this town turns over a steady amount of it.
- Mine did low miles but hard ones.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.