Dauphin County
A quarry two thirds of a mile out, and a very large landlord
The operation attached here is a crushed-stone quarry about 0.66 miles south-east of the middle of this borough, worked by New Enterprise Stone & Lime with 16 people on the books at the Mine Safety and Health Administration. That is close enough that the pit and the town are effectively one address.
The operator is the thing worth noting.
Four hundred and forty-one structures, and the county posts none of them
That river is why the road count here is what it is. Within 10 miles the National Bridge Inventory records 441 structures — by some way the densest circle in this part of the state — because a wide river with a state capital on it produces a great many crossings, and modern ones.
Against that, only 11 are posted for load: six township, three county and two state. And of the 51 bridges Dauphin County maintains in the whole National Bridge Inventory, not one carries a posted-for-load code.
Six structures inside the circle are closed outright, the nearest 2.90 miles out. A closed crossing is not a weight problem, it is a route problem, and in a network this dense the way round is usually short.
What a dense network does to a truck
So the constraint here is traffic rather than tonnage. Where a network is this large and this lightly restricted, what wears a truck out is congestion, stop-start running and distance — brakes, clutch and engine hours — rather than the springs-and-hoist pattern of a place where every load goes out part filled.
The nearest posted crossing is 3.84 miles west and clears 22.0 US tons; the tightest inside 10 miles is 15.0 tons, 7.34 miles south-west. Neither is on the short run between the quarry and the river, so most local work never met one.
It is the opposite reading from the western counties of this state, and it is worth knowing which a truck came from. The two histories leave different evidence and the odometer alone will not tell them apart.
Rail in three directions, and a depot next door
Those short lanes run into a lot of rail. The Rutherford ramp is 2.89 miles north-east with its yard 3.38 miles, the Harrisburg yard 5.82 miles north-west with a ramp at 6.84, and the Enola yards 7.24 and 8.57 miles north-west.
Stone sits east and west: Byler Quarries 4.81 miles east with 18 people, a Pennsy Supply pit 4.96 miles east with 12, and further out the Locust Point and Silver Springs quarries 12.65 and 13.15 miles west with 13 and 19.
And there is government freight in the mix. A defence distribution depot is 1.42 miles south-west, a naval support activity 8.50 miles west and Carlisle Barracks 18.17 miles west, which puts a different kind of contract work on the same roads as the aggregate.
A truck that spent its life in this circle usually has ordinary road wear and a lot of it. Short urban lanes with plenty of loading put cycles on the clutch and hoist faster than the odometer suggests, and a drayage tractor off a ramp adds queuing hours that never show as miles at all.
- With the Rutherford ramp 2.89 miles north-east and the yards 5.82 miles north-west, plenty of trucks in this borough never left Dauphin County.
Between New Enterprise Stone & Lime and the Rutherford Yard 3.38 miles north-east they turn up steadily.