Delaware County
A port, a refinery terminal and three yards, all inside six miles
Nothing industrial is filed inside this borough, and a great deal is filed just outside it. The Port of Philadelphia is 2.47 miles south-east, a bulk terminal 2.54 miles east, a rail yard 2.75 miles east and the Philadelphia Energy Solutions terminal 2.96 miles east.
The pattern continues out to six miles: the Greenwich Yards 5.80 miles south-east, another yard 5.83 miles east, and one 6.02 miles north. Over the river the Port of Paulsboro sits 5.71 miles south in New Jersey.
The only quarry in reach is small and the other way. Media Quarry is 6.07 miles west with 7 people, working dimension stone. So a truck kept in this borough almost certainly worked east, into the port and refinery ground, rather than west into stone.
Nine hundred and eighty-five crossings, and the railway maintains eight of the restricted ones
That industry sits under a very crowded road network. Within 10 miles the National Bridge Inventory records 985 structures, 814 of them Pennsylvania’s and 171 New Jersey’s, and 44 are below legal loads.
The ownership of those 44 is what makes this address different from anywhere else on this site. 8 of them are carried as railroad structures — maintained by a railway rather than by any road authority — alongside 18 municipal, 12 state, 4 township and just 2 county. Where a rail network this dense crosses a road network this dense, the railway ends up owning the bridges.
The nearest restriction is 1.02 miles east and it is one of those railroad structures, clearing 58.1 tonnes, which a legal load crosses whole. The lowest figure in the circle is 3.6 tonnes 5.19 miles out, also a railroad structure, and the file records it as closed rather than posted.
The county posts one bridge in thirty-nine
Those figures leave the county road department almost out of the picture. Delaware County maintains 39 structures of its own and posts exactly 1 of them.
A county restriction rate therefore describes almost nothing about this ground. A lane out of this borough answers to a borough highway department, to PennDOT, or to a railway’s bridge engineer, and hardly ever to the county — so asking the county about a posted crossing here will usually reach the wrong office.
It also means the restrictions are scattered across many small authorities rather than concentrated in one — from the railroad crossing 1.02 miles east to the closed one 5.19 miles out. 18 municipal postings across the boroughs and townships in this circle is a lot of separate offices for a lane of a few miles to cross.
Port work, and the trucks a borough like this actually holds
So the trucking geography around the Philadelphia Energy Solutions terminal 2.96 miles east and the port ground 2.47 miles south-east is terminal drayage rather than pit work.
But the borough itself is residential, and that is the part that decides what comes up for sale. Trucks here belong to contractors, landscapers, small hauliers and families rather than to an operation with a gate, and they stand at houses and on small lots rather than in a fleet line.
Two wear patterns therefore turn up in the same few streets. Both are ordinary and neither is a reason we would not buy.
A truck standing on a residential street for a year or two is normal here. We would rather be told it has stood than be told it runs and find out on the day.
- Common here — 18 of the restricted crossings within ten miles belong to boroughs. A collection at an address on the posted road counts as local traffic, and either way it is ours to work out: 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.
- It ran into the port and over into New Jersey.Routine here. 171 of the 985 crossings within ten miles are New Jersey’s and the Port of Paulsboro is 5.71 miles south, so we buy across the line as a matter of course.
With the Port of Philadelphia 2.47 miles south-east and Media Quarry 6.07 miles west, they come off one at a time and we buy them that way.