Bucks County
Thirteen people, and three quarries under one operator
The Warrington Quarry works crushed stone with thirteen people on the books at Mine Safety and Health Administration, which is a small crew for a plant sitting inside a metropolitan aggregate market.
Eureka Stone Quarry runs it, and runs two more in the same county — one at Chalfont about 3.7 miles north-west and Penns Park Quarry at Richboro about 6.7 miles east. Naceville Materials holds three more here. Two regional operators between them hold six of the eight quarries the Mine Safety and Health Administration lists in this county.
Here the county owns the bridges, which is backwards for this state
That matters because of who posts the roads those quarries feed. Bucks County maintains 108 bridges of its own against its townships’ 87 — the reverse of the Pennsylvania pattern, where townships hold about a quarter more local structures than counties do.
Twenty-five of the county’s fail the federal below-legal-loads test against nine of the townships’, so here, unusually, the county figure really is most of the local road environment. Within 10 miles of the Warrington Quarry the National Bridge Inventory records 356 structures and thirteen below legal loads, eight of them the county’s and four on township roads.
The nearest restriction is three and a third miles out
Those crossings are not distant. The closest structure coded below legal loads lies 3.34 miles from this quarry, and the lowest operating rating among the restricted ones here is 13.6 metric tonnes — about fifteen US tons, enough for a part load and not a full one.
So the trucks work short repeated hauls inside a ring of counties — Bucks, Montgomery, Chester and Delaware — feeding a market of roughly six million people.
Spring House Quarry lies about 5.6 miles south-west at Glenside and Plumstead Materials about 8.2 miles north at Doylestown. A metropolitan aggregate market takes stone continuously rather than seasonally, so the wear here is duty-cycle wear — brakes, clutch, suspension and tyres ahead of the engine.
A truck out of Eureka Stone Quarry or Naceville Materials has usually run a short posted route over and over rather than long highway miles. That shows in the driveline and the brakes long before it shows on the odometer.
The rest is ordinary. Retirements, estates, and the truck that has sat behind the shop since the last season it was needed — between Blooming Glen Quarry about 10.2 miles north-west and the Morrisville Yard and Tyburn Yard down on the river, they turn up steadily.