Delaware County
Dimension stone in the Philadelphia orbit, and not the kind you have heard of
A dimension-stone quarry 1.17 miles from the Census centre reports 7 employees to the Mine Safety and Health Administration and is carried as a surface operation under MSHA identifier 3600164.
Dimension stone in this state usually means the bluestone district in the north-east corner, and this is not that. This is south-eastern Pennsylvania, inside the Philadelphia orbit: different rock, different market, different freight.
Why the employee count tells you almost nothing
Those dimension-stone operations make the point better than any argument. The Rolling Rock Pit carries 38 people, the largest dimension-stone operation on the Mine Safety and Health Administration’s record for the state, and the smallest on that record carries 2 — a spread of nineteen to one across sites doing recognisably the same work.
So the payroll figure is a poor guide to how much freight a site generates. What it does say is that a seven-person quarry is normal in Delaware County rather than marginal.
The operation falls under the federal training part covering surface stone, which requires site-specific hazard awareness training for delivery drivers before work at each site — each site, not once.
Three ports inside nine miles
Beyond the quarry the district is industrial in a way this borough is not. The Pyramid Quarry works 4.4 miles off, Glen Mills works granite 6.5 miles away at Chester Heights with 32 people, and a transloading yard sits 4.7 miles out at Chester.
Then it becomes water. A port sits 5.2 miles off at Eddystone, another 8.0 miles away at Colwyn, a third 8.3 miles out, and a fourth across the river at Paulsboro in New Jersey. Rail terminals sit at Philadelphia 8.6 miles away and Yeadon 8.8 miles out.
Granite is harder and more abrasive than limestone, and cut stone is a slow, heavy, awkward load rather than a bulk one. Both wear a truck differently from aggregate work.
Flatbeds and step decks off the cut stone, dumps, day cabs, rollbacks, box trucks, straight trucks, service bodies and pickups.
Cut stone rides in slabs and blocks and it punishes a deck, a headboard and the tie-down points. Between Glen Mills 6.5 miles off and the port at Eddystone 5.2 miles away the runs are short and the loads are dense, so the wear is structural rather than mechanical.
- The deck is gouged from slab work.Expected on cut stone and we allow for it. Around Chester Heights every deck looks like that.
- It only ever did short local runs.Ordinary this close to the ports, with Eddystone 5.2 miles off. Low mileage does not mean an easy life and we look at the truck itself.
A seven-person quarry replaces a truck when it has to, not on a schedule.
The rest is the ordinary run of it between Chester Heights 6.5 miles off and Yeadon 8.8 miles away — retirements, estates and contracts that ended.