Wayne County
Every operation here is smaller than a crew
Jen Rutledge Materials works broken stone at the borough with four people, MBK Associates LLC cuts dimension stone with two about 6 miles north, and the Moldenhauer Quarry works three about 17 miles away.
The pattern holds as far as you care to look. The Leeward Middle Creek Quarry works three about 18 miles south, the Holbert Quarry four about 20 miles, and the Hancock Quarry — twelve people on traprock about 15 miles off — is the largest of them.
Thirty-four miles to the nearest rail
Those crew sizes tell you the whole economics. The nearest rail yard listed by the North American Rail Network maintained by the Federal Railroad Administration and the Bureau of Transportation Statistics is about 34 miles southwest.
So nobody here runs a fleet. Between MBK Associates LLC about 6 miles north and the Holbert Quarry about 20 miles south, the hauling is done by owner-drivers who also do something else, and a truck is often twenty years old because replacing it is a very large decision.
Hill roads, and a township owns all of them
It is the emptiness that makes a posting matter here. With so few destinations there are few alternative roads, and a plated structure on a hill lane is a closure rather than an inconvenience.
In Pennsylvania the binding figure on such a lane is frequently posted rather than statutory, and townships maintain 3,198 structures statewide against the counties’ 2,599 — out here it is nearly all of them. Between the Hancock Quarry and the Moldenhauer Quarry about 17 miles off, a permit is a real cost to one owner-driver.
All of it, and single trucks especially. Dump trucks and aggregate haulers first. Flatbeds for the dimension work, day cabs and road tractors, rollbacks, box trucks, service bodies and the pickups and work trucks a farm or a small outfit keeps.
Most of it works between Jen Rutledge Materials, the Hancock Quarry and the Leeward Middle Creek Quarry.
- Are you really coming out here?Honest answer: most often we buy it remotely and arrange the tow, and nobody makes the drive at all. From here that is usually the fastest way. If you would rather we came and drove it away, we will.
- It is twenty years old and it still works.That is the normal truck out of this county and it is exactly what we buy.
- How far is anything from here?About 6 miles to MBK Associates LLC, about 15 miles to the Hancock Quarry and about 34 miles to the nearest rail. That is the shape of it.
A farm that stopped hauling its own.
Yards near the Moldenhauer Quarry and out toward the Holbert Quarry hold a few in exactly that position.