Blair County
Forty-seven people on a quarry inside the borough
The Roaring Spring Quarry works crushed stone 0.89 miles from the centre of this borough, with 47 people on the books at Mine Safety and Health Administration under New Enterprise Stone & Lime. The median Pennsylvania crushed-stone quarry carries 13, so 47 is well up the range, and this one is inside the town rather than out on a haul road.
So the plant and the place are the same address here, which is not usually the case on these pages.
That operator spans most of central Pennsylvania
That operator is not local to this valley.
For a truck that means one specification, one maintenance standard and one replacement cycle across road environments that differ sharply. Centre County has no county-maintained bridges at all, while Cumberland carries a 12.7-tonne cap on fifteen restricted crossings.
So a machine off this company is more transferable within the fleet than its county figures suggest, and less comparable between counties than the shared operator name implies.
The road here mostly holds a full load
Those crossings are the reason to check. Nine are posted for load and ten are coded below legal loads, seven of them county-maintained and two on township roads, and the nearest is 1.70 miles out.
Across Blair County as a whole, 11 of 56 county-maintained structures fail the load field and four of 28 township-maintained ones do.
Straight along the valley, hard across it
Those routes are not symmetrical. This is Ridge and Valley country, where folded rock has weathered into long parallel limestone valleys separated by sandstone ridges running north-east to south-west, and the roads follow that grain.
A run along a valley is straight and a run across one climbs a ridge, so haul distance understates haul cost in the cross-grain direction and a market that looks circular on a map is a long narrow one. The 13.2 miles north-east to Grannas Brothers at Williamsburg runs with the grain; the 11.9 miles north-west to RES Cresson crosses it, and the two do not cost the same.
There is a Pennsylvania wrinkle on top of it: the posting authority is the township as often as the county, so a lane running the length of a single valley can cross several posting authorities without ever leaving the same rock. In Blair County that is 56 county-maintained structures and 28 township-maintained ones, answering to different offices.
Shops, mines and a readiness centre within fifteen miles
Those valleys hold a lot of work. Penn Mag Plant #2 lies about 5.8 miles south-west at Sproul with five people, the Samuel Rea Shops about 7.0 miles north at Loop, and the Hollidaysburg readiness centre about 7.3 miles north at Fort Fetter.
North-west it turns to coal: the Cresson mine about 13.3 miles with 69 people on the books, RES Cresson about 11.9 miles with 20, the Sonman Refuse Site about 12.4 miles with four and the Portage Plant about 14.2 miles west with 19.
North-east and north the stone and the rail — Grannas Brothers about 13.2 miles north-east at Williamsburg with ten, the Juniata Shops about 13.5 miles north at Altoona, the Altoona yard about 13.7 miles north and the Cresson yard about 13.9 miles north-west at Sankertown.
A truck off this ground usually carried a proper load rather than a token one, so the wear is ridge wear — brakes, clutch and cooling from the climbs across the grain, ahead of anything the flat miles would have done.
- I am out towards the ridge.