The Southeast Missouri Lead Belt, and six mines under one owner
The Viburnum Trend is the Southeast Missouri Lead Belt. Six mines sit along it, all six operated by The Doe Run Company and controlled by Renco Group, with 663 people between them — Fletcher 189, Sweetwater 157, Brushy Creek 139, Casteel 98, Buick 73 and Viburnum #29 seven.
These are underground lead-zinc mines with mills attached, which is why four of the six carry Mine or Mill in the name. That means the equipment around here was mostly bought to one specification and maintained by one outfit.
Lead is heavy, so the trucks leave here looking empty
That ore is what makes the haulage here unlike anywhere else in the state. Lead concentrate is exceptionally dense. It weighs out at a fraction of a trailer’s cubic capacity, so every loaded truck leaving these mines is at its weight limit with a box that still looks half empty.
It is a real difference in how a machine has been worked. A truck that reaches 80,000 lb without filling its body has spent its life loading heavy and low, and the wear falls on the frame, the suspension and the brakes rather than on volume-related things. Anyone who has run one of these knows the difference; we would rather hear it from you than guess.
The stone here is different in kind as well. The rock is rhyolite, granite and trap rock, which is very much harder than the limestone and dolomite worked everywhere else in the state. Harder rock is denser and more abrasive, so a full body weighs more for the same volume and the material is harder on liners, tailgates and tyres. No wear figure is claimed for that — what can be said is that the rock is different, and a seller should say which one a machine carried.
And the roads out of here are the most restricted in Missouri
Those loaded trucks then have to get out through the most route-constrained corner of the state. Five of the ten most restricted county road networks in Missouri are in this part of the Ozarks. Wayne County restricts 30 of 69 county-maintained structures, second of the 109 counties that maintain at least twenty. Reynolds is third, Douglas sixth, Oregon seventh and Bollinger tenth.
Within ten miles of the crushed-stone operation here there are 31 structures and six are rated below legal loads — all six county-maintained, the nearest 5.80 miles out. The lowest that still admits a loaded commercial vehicle is rated about 13.9 US tons, which takes a tandem dump across barely loaded.
For a truck that means a load here was routed rather than simply loaded, and the wear falls on running gear and brakes rather than on the engine. Iron County itself restricts 8 of 40.
Dump trucks and aggregate haulers off the stone and the ore.
A machine that worked underground ran at steady temperature and out of the weather, which is a very different life from one that ran the county roads above. If that is your truck, say so — it is the most useful single thing you can tell us. The Doe Run Company works six mines along this trend, and across Iron County they turn over a steady amount of equipment.
- A mine runs at steady temperature and out of the weather, so a machine that stayed inside has had a very different life from one that ran the roads out here.
Around the Doe Run workings, and across Iron County generally, there is usually one sitting.