Boone County
A hundred and ninety crossings, and six that bind
The 63 Quarry records 10 employees, 4.55 miles from the middle of Hartsburg.
Six of them carry a posting and six are coded below legal loads. On a network that size those are small numbers, and the county figure says the same thing from a different direction: Boone County has 4 of the 143 structures it maintains coded below legal loads, 2.8 per cent, against 12.7 across Missouri’s counties.
What six restrictions still do to a body
Six is not none, and two of the six are worth knowing about. Four are the county’s own, the nearest 1.74 miles out, and the lowest rating in the group is 4.5 tonnes — under the 11.0-tonne tare of an empty tandem dump, so no commercial vehicle crosses that one at all, loaded or empty.
The lowest that does admit one is rated 17.1 tonnes, about 18.8 US tons, leaving roughly 6.1 tonnes of stone over that tare against the twenty-five a legal 80,000 lb truck carries.
The difference between here and the thin-network country further south is not the arithmetic on the crossing, which is much the same. It is what it costs to avoid it. With 190 structures inside ten miles there is nearly always another way round, and going round is cheap.
The rest of the haulage around a pit like this is farm work, and Missouri lets grain and grain co-products run ten per cent over the maximum during harvest so long as the truck stays off the interstate.
Farm trucks and grain hauls off the bottom ground around it. Between the pit and Columbia, Boone County, Callaway County and Cole County turn over a steady amount of it.