One operation, half a mile out
If it is a processor, the freight is not a bulk truck at all
The operation here is Penn Mag Plant #2, about 0.50 miles west of the middle of this place, which the Mine Safety and Health Administration lists as a metal mine working chromite ore, with 5 people on it.
Materials of this kind — refractory magnesia, tungsten carbide powder and the like — are low volume and high value, shipped in drums, boxes and bulk bags on pallets rather than in a tipping body. A week’s outbound might be one pallet.
So the truck that served it is a box van or a day cab pulling light, not an aggregate hauler: a light-duty duty cycle on a heavy-duty chassis, wearing tyres and driveline on miles and very little else. Inbound is often imported in containers, which would put a drayage leg in front of it and that is a different life again.
This is the one operation in this valley where the posted-road system is close to irrelevant. Nothing leaving Penn Mag Plant #2 on a pallet is troubling an 80,000 lb ceiling, and the contrast with the Roaring Spring Quarry 5.84 miles north-east could hardly be sharper — the same roads, two entirely different trucks.
Two crossings here take no commercial vehicle at all
That is not true of everything else on these roads. Within 10 miles the National Bridge Inventory records 138 structures and 11 are posted for load — and every one of the 11 is local, six maintained by townships and five by Blair County, with not a single posted state structure among them.
Two of them sit below the point where a commercial vehicle crosses even empty: one 8.86 miles south-west rating 9.0 US tons operating and one 8.20 miles north-west at 12.0. An empty tandem dump weighs more than the first of those admits, so it is not a partial-load crossing, it is a closed one for this trade.
The nearest posted crossing is 1.89 miles west and clears 31.0 tons, which a loaded truck takes. Blair County maintains 56 bridges and posts 11 of them, so on these lanes the posting authority is a township or the county nearly every time, and a single route can cross more than one of them.
Coal to the north-west, shops to the north
Beyond that half-mile site the valley is working ground in two directions. North-east is stone: the Roaring Spring Quarry 5.84 miles out with 47 people, much the largest crew inside ten miles of here.
North-west is coal, and it is a cluster rather than a single mine — Cresson 14.09 miles with 69 people, RES Cresson 12.75 miles with 20, the Portage plant 13.32 miles with 19 under Rosebud Mining, and the Sonman refuse site 12.82 miles with 4. Refuse and reclaimed piles count as surface mining in this state, which is why banks and piles appear alongside working mines.
Due north it is railway: the Samuel Rea Shops 12.06 miles, the Juniata Shops 18.20 miles and the Altoona yards 18.44 miles. Three different industries, three different fleets, all inside a half-hour drive of a plant that ships pallets.
A truck that carried palletised product has a very different history from one that carried stone or coal, and it usually shows in the opposite places — tyres and driveline against miles rather than springs and hoist against cycles. If it ran high-value freight there may be security or telematics equipment fitted; tell us whether it stays with the truck.
- Low weight, low cycle count, plenty of miles — a perfectly ordinary history and we buy them.
- It came off a coal fleet.Ordinary out towards Cresson. Between Rosebud Mining and the refuse sites 13 miles north-west we see them regularly, one truck or several.
- It is behind a bridge nothing legal can cross.Then we tow it or buy it where it stands. Two crossings inside 10 miles take no commercial vehicle even empty, so this comes up here — we come out and drive it away, we come out and tow it, we buy it remotely and arrange the tow, or you bring it to us.
Between Penn Mag Plant #2 and the Roaring Spring Quarry 5.84 miles north-east they turn up steadily.