One employee, and a district that ships across the country
Nicholson Pit reports one employee to Mine Safety and Health Administration, carried as a surface operation working industrial sand under Airport Sand & Gravel. A one-person operation runs no highway fleet, so the truck connection here runs through the district rather than through the pit.
The district is bluestone. It is the dense, hard, fine-grained sandstone of the Catskill Formation, once sold as Delaware Flags, laid down in the Catskill Delta roughly 370 to 345 million years ago, and it is quarried across the north-east corner of this state.
A district of about 150 small quarries
American bluestone is produced by about 150 mostly small quarries across adjacent parts of two states, and the Pennsylvania Bluestone Association has 105 members, the vast majority of them quarriers.
McClain Quarry and McClain Stone Co lie about 8.7 miles north-west, Elk Lake about 14.1 miles north-west and Hilltop Quarry about 7.2 miles south.
The miles here are real miles
So the constraint is local, but the haul is not. Bluestone is flagstone, wall stone, treads, steps and patio stone — a landscape and architectural product, palletised and sold wholesale across the country rather than shuttled around a district.
That makes the freight long-haul palletised flatbed work. New York City is about 150 miles south-east and Philadelphia about 130 miles south, and the north-eastern market is reached by genuine highway running. Unlike the short-radius stone districts, a high odometer here is not a warning sign.
It is a load that shifts, though. Thin, flat, irregular pieces stacked and banded on pallets settle in transit, so strapping, edge protection and re-tensioning matter more than on a block haul, and a long run compounds it. Deck wear is forklift tines and pallet corners.
Flatbeds and step decks that ran pallets south, road tractors and sleepers that went with them, dumps and haulers off the pits, plus rollbacks, service bodies and pickups.
A truck out of this district has usually run to a market 130 to 150 miles off and back rather than around a quarry, the way the Airport Sand & Gravel pallets go, so the engine and the driveline have done real work and the deck has taken forklift traffic at both ends. Both are ordinary and neither is a reason we would walk away.
Most of this district is a handful of people and a few trucks, so a retirement or a season that did not come good puts equipment up quickly and there is nobody to absorb it internally.
Beyond that the ordinary ones. Around Meshoppen Stone about 16.4 miles west, estates and wound-up partnerships turn up steadily.