The Adirondacks
The mine here does not produce stone. It produces garnet
Two rows are attached to North Creek and the interesting one is a mine on Ruby Mountain. NYSDEC’s register carries it 0.50 miles from the node coordinate: permittee Barton Mines Company LLC, status active, 253.1 acres affected, commodity garnet, record last modified in March 2025.
The history is unusually well documented for a row in this list. Henry Hudson Barton was looking for a better abrasive when he reached Gore Mountain in 1878 and found a hard-rock garnet that dominated the industrial abrasive trade for more than a century. In the early 1980s the operation moved to Ruby Mountain at North River.
One correction worth making, because the data has it wrong: the row is filed under a miscellaneous metal-ore label. Garnet is not a metal ore. We are reporting the register, not the label.
What that means for a truck
And the product is the thing that wears other equipment out
That distinction is not academic. Garnet is an abrasive — waterjet cutting, sandblasting, lapping, abrasive coatings — so what comes off Ruby Mountain is, by design, the material used to cut and strip other material.
A truck hauling it lives with that. Abrasive dust gets into everything it is not meant to be in, and bodies, seals and tipping gear wear in a way a sand or gravel truck’s do not. None of that stops us buying and none of it is a fault in the truck; it is the trade. Tell us what it hauled and we will read the wear correctly rather than as neglect.
The other row here is a rail yard 0.85 miles from the centroid under the North Creek Railway name, attached by nearest-centroid fallback. What moved through it could not be determined from any source we read.
New York weight law
Which the weight rules treat like any other divisible load
Which is the point at which garnet stops being special.
Vehicle and Traffic Law § 385 sets a maximum of 80,000 lb or less depending on axle spacing, and above legal weight the owner obtains a divisible load overweight permit from NYSDOT. There is no list of favoured commodities in it — stone and aggregate are divisible loads by definition. An overweight move that is not also over-dimensional, is within 125% of legal weight and can hold traffic-flow speed is not restricted as to times or days of travel.
Beneath the permit the state allows 22,400 lb on a single axle and 36,000 lb on two consecutive axles under eight feet, against federal figures of 20,000 lb and 34,000 lb, and federal limits govern the interstate system.
N.Y. Veh. & Traf. Law § 385. Information, not legal advice.
New York paperwork
We need a title — unless it never had one
Beyond the permits, the paperwork comes down to 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. New York reaches its salvage brand by four separate routes, and its seventy-five per cent repair-cost test applies only to a vehicle eight model years old or newer, so on an older truck it does not arise. Once applied the brand is permanent, and the DMV must examine a rebuilt vehicle for stolen parts before it can be registered or titled.
New York DMV, salvage and rebuilt-salvage titling. Information, not legal advice, and only as current as the date the rule file was last verified.
What we buy around North Creek
Those rules cover all of it, and all of it is iron we buy. Dump trucks and aggregate haulers off the mountain ground. Flatbeds, day cabs, box trucks, service bodies, and the work trucks and pickups that go out with a crew.
Whatever you drive, the offer doesn’t change. We buy all of them — a Barton Mines truck off 253.1 acres of permitted ground and a pickup out of a driveway get the same answer.
We buy complete trucks. If the engine, transmission, doors, rear ends, drive shafts, wheels or anything under the hood have been removed, we can’t buy it. Small things — a missing bumper — are fine.
Straight answers
The questions we get asked in North Creek
- 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. A lost title has a counter replacement; where none exists there’s a bonded route.
- It hauled garnet and the body is scoured to bits.Expected. Abrasive is what the product is for, and a scoured body on a Ruby Mountain truck reads as the trade rather than as neglect. Photographs all the way round tell us more than a description.
- Will anyone come out this far?They can. More often we buy it remotely and arrange the tow, which saves the run into the mountains. The rail row here is 0.85 miles from the centre and is not part of it either way.
Why people call
Beyond a truck that has finished its working life, the reasons are personal ones. Retiring. A contract at the mine that ended. A medical that went the wrong way.
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 — and out here the buyer is rarely down the road, which is the part we handle. Gore Mountain and Ruby Mountain are both a long way from a saleroom.
New York weight and title rules current as of August 2026 — verify with the New York DMV and NYSDOT before acting on them. Sources: the New York Consolidated Laws, the New York DMV, NYSDOT , NYSDEC’s mined land register, MSHA, plus the central node list.