Over the county line
Twenty-five people on a quarry in the next county along
The Princeton quarry works crushed stone with twenty-five people on the books at Mine Safety and Health Administration, under Allegheny Mineral. Twenty-five is a substantial crew for a crushed-stone pit, and it is a working plant rather than a one-man pit.
This borough sits in Butler County and the quarry it is named to sits about three miles off in Lawrence County, which is why the road figures below are Lawrence County’s. The two are adjacent and the lanes run across the line constantly.
A cap barely above the weight of the empty truck
That crossing point is where this place differs from the eastern end of the state. Within 10 miles of the Allegheny Mineral pit, in Lawrence County, the National Bridge Inventory records 200 structures, thirteen of them below legal loads, four county-maintained and six on township roads, and the nearest is 1.00 miles out.
The lowest operating rating in the circle is 3.6 metric tonnes, under the level at which any commercial vehicle crosses even empty. The lowest that clears the commercial floor is 11.8 tonnes, about thirteen US tons — which admits roughly 0.8 tonnes of stone over the 11.0-tonne tare of an empty tandem dump.
That is a token load rather than a reduced one. Sixteen of the twenty western Pennsylvania sites measured carry a floor of 11.8 or 12.7 tonnes, where the Philadelphia ring ran 12.7 to 20.9 and admitted between 1.7 and 9.9 tonnes. Both regions bind; what separates them is how hard.
A ring of workings around New Castle
Those lanes all point the same way. The Lacko Mine lies about 1.6 miles north-west, Reese Road about 6.9 miles north at Slippery Rock, the Shenango Mine about 7.0 miles west and Moscipan about 7.7 miles west.
Further out the rail and river country: two New Castle yards on the North American Rail Network maintained by the Federal Railroad Administration and the Bureau of Transportation Statistics about 8.9 miles west, and another about 9.1 miles west at South New Castle.
North-east is different again — the Slippery Rock quarry about 9.0 miles north-east is the nearest operation on this borough’s own side of the county line, and the Cress Pit about 8.6 miles north at Volant.
A machine from here carried partial loads wherever the tight crossings fell on the route, and there are a lot of them. That ages the running gear ahead of the structure — springs, hoist and pins before the engine, and the same truck often shows a low odometer.
Around the Cress Pit about 8.6 miles north they turn up steadily.