Bucks County
A yard, an intermodal ramp and a river, inside four miles
The North American Rail Network maintained by the Federal Railroad Administration and the Bureau of Transportation Statistics lists a rail yard 1.21 miles south of the middle of town. What makes this address unusual is what surrounds it: an intermodal ramp 2.25 miles east, a second yard 3.90 miles east, a fuel terminal 5.28 miles east and a third yard 6.44 miles east.
That is a freight corridor rather than a working district, and the ground behind it is quarry country. The Penns Park Quarry of Heidelberg Materials sits 7.29 miles north-west with 24 people and the Rush Valley Quarry Plant 7.73 miles north-west with 13.
East of all of it is the state line. A New Jersey yard sits 5.64 miles north-east, and the river between them is the reason the next two sections read the way they do.
Two hundred and one of the crossings inside ten miles are New Jersey’s
That river makes ten miles a two-state question. Within the circle the National Bridge Inventory records 538 structures, 337 of them Pennsylvania’s and 201 New Jersey’s — well over a third of the network filed in another state’s book, with the nearest New Jersey structure 2.60 miles out.
It is why every figure on this page is read from every state file with structures inside the radius rather than from the Pennsylvania one alone. Reading the home file only would have dropped two hundred crossings and then described the remainder as the whole network.
29 of the 538 are below legal loads, and they are split across six kinds of authority: 10 state, 8 toll authority, 5 county, 2 township, 2 municipal, and one each carried as a park agency and a railroad.
Seven crossings are recorded twice, and the two states disagree by a tenth of a tonne
Those toll structures raise something a two-state circle has to handle. A river crossing belongs to both banks, so both states’ National Bridge Inventory files record it — and inside this circle 7 structures appear in the Pennsylvania file and the New Jersey file alike.
The paired records agree on almost everything and not quite on the rating. The crossing 5.87 miles east, built in 1884, is rated 32.7 tonnes by one file and 32.9 by the other; the one 6.29 miles east, built in 1928, reads 50.8 and 51.2; the one 6.52 miles north, built in 1904, reads 8.2 and 8.3. Tenths of a tonne apart, which is rounding rather than disagreement, and confirmation that these are two independent records of one bridge.
It changes the arithmetic more than it changes the driving. 4 of the 29 records below legal loads are one of these pairs, so the circle really holds 25 distinct restricted crossings rather than 29. The tightest of them is that 1904 crossing at about 8.2 tonnes — under an empty tandem dump, so nothing commercial uses it whichever file you read.
Drayage, not distance
So the work that came out of this address was mostly short and mostly repeated. An intermodal ramp 2.25 miles east, a yard 1.21 miles south and two more at 3.90 and 6.44 miles east is a drayage geography: containers and trailers moved between a box and a rail head over a few miles, many times a day.
Their locations support the shape of the work rather than the content of the load.
Drayage leaves a particular truck. The odometer stays low while the clutch, brakes, tyres, fifth wheel, suspension and door gear do a full life’s work, and a day cab off this ground is usually older in every way but mileage. That is normal here and we read it as the job rather than as neglect.
A truck that worked both sides of the river is the normal case here rather than the exception, and it changes nothing for us. We buy across state lines routinely.
- Most of its work was in New Jersey.Normal at this address. 201 of the 538 crossings within ten miles are New Jersey’s, and the intermodal ramp 2.25 miles east feeds both sides of the river, so plenty of trucks here spent half their week over the water. It makes no difference to the offer.
- The miles are low for a day cab.Drayage does that. Short repeated cycles wear the clutch, brakes and fifth wheel long before the odometer notices.
- It is stored at a yard, not at my house.We deal with the yard directly if you would rather not be there.
Between the yard 1.21 miles south and the Penns Park Quarry 7.29 miles north-west they turn up steadily.