We buy trucks in Alcoa

One row is filed under this town in the node list. It is a military-installation row for the Tyson Airport site, and for that row the acreage, the strength and the mission are all unestablished. The research that produced it records it as thin rather than dressing it up.

What it does establish is where the point sits. The coordinate reverse-geocodes to Blount County, and that is the whole of the local record on it.

So this page is not going to tell you what happens on that site or how much freight it generates. We don’t know, and neither does anything we have read. Saying so is more use to you than a paragraph of plausible filler.

That is a legitimate way to read a place and it is the honest one here. Blount County is on the record even where this one row is not, and what it records is stone.

Vulcan Materials holds the approved aggregate source at the Maryville pit, matched to the register by coordinate at 0.14 miles, with 17 people on it. Over at Friendsville, Brown Quarry works dimension marble with 22 people, operator of record the Tennessee Marble Company — a named American dimension stone in the same class as Elberton granite and Indiana limestone.

Crushed stone and dimension stone are different trades with different trucks. The first moves high-tonnage bulk on short hauls; the second moves fewer, heavier, more awkward loads and cares about how they are secured. A county carrying both is a county with a mixed fleet in it, which is what we generally find here.

Both of those trades run over the same county network, and it is an easy one. Blount County posts 4 of its 59 county-maintained bridges, 6.8%, against a statewide county-maintained rate of 12.9%.

Within ten miles of the Maryville pit the inventory records 152 structures and 8 are coded posted for load, 3 of them county-maintained, the nearest 2.2 miles out. The lowest raw rating among them is 8.4 metric tonnes, below an empty tandem dump and so not a crossing this trade uses at all. The lowest that a commercial vehicle could actually use is 17.2 tonnes, and that is the cap that binds a loaded truck — about 6.2 tonnes of stone over the eleven-tonne tare of an empty tandem.

One caution on that 6.8%. Tennessee codes item 41 more broadly than its neighbours: only 42% of the bridges it marks posted also fail the separate item-70 test for carrying legal loads, where four neighbouring states run 90% to 99%. So the true count of load-restricted crossings here is lower than the posted count, not higher.

FHWA National Bridge Inventory 2025, Tennessee file, items 41, 64 and 70, and the TDOT Materials and Tests Producer List. Measured from the Maryville node, the nearest researched point in this county.

Those open roads sit under a weight statute that gives this trade nothing extra.

Tenn. Code Ann. § 55-7-203 sets 80,000 lb gross, 20,000 lb on a single axle and 34,000 lb on a tandem, with up to 550 lb more for emissions-reduction equipment. Subsection (b)(7) grants a ten per cent margin of error on the weighing to logging, sand, coal, clay, shale, phosphate, solid waste, recovered materials, farm trucks and machinery trucks — off the interstate system only. Crushed stone is absent, and so are limestone, aggregate and gravel.

§ 55-7-103 lets the department set a lower maximum between 15 January and 15 April, and at any other time for repairs, weather or recent construction, with a week’s notice posted at the termini of the road and at every detour.

And § 55-7-104 is the one that costs a working day: an overweight vehicle may not be moved until the load is reduced into compliance or a permit obtained, and failing to comply is itself a Class C misdemeanour.

Tenn. Code Ann. §§ 55-7-103, 55-7-104 and 55-7-203, as summarised by the University of Tennessee County Technical Assistance Service. Information, not legal advice.

Beyond the weight rules, the paperwork is one sentence.

Everything after that sentence is a fix rather than a category. A lost title has a counter replacement. Where none exists there is a bonded route. Neither one stops a sale.

The salvage rule is the one people repeat wrongly. Tennessee’s salvage and rebuilt part is built on the term passenger motor vehicle, and § 55-3-201 defines that as a vehicle ten model years old or less which, if it is a light-duty truck or a multipurpose vehicle, is rated at not more than nine thousand pounds gross.

So the seventy-five per cent threshold does not reach a truck rated above nine thousand pounds at any age, and does not reach a vehicle of any kind over ten model years old. Those limbs describe the class the part governs rather than exceptions inside it. Whether some other provision reaches such a vehicle was not determined and is not claimed here.

Tenn. Code Ann. § 55-3-201 and § 55-3-211, with the Tennessee Department of Revenue’s guidance. Information, not legal advice, and only as current as the day those were read.

Those two rules cover every kind of iron we buy, and around Blount County that is a wide range. Tandem dumps and aggregate haulers off the crushed-stone side. Flatbeds and the heavier tackle the dimension-stone side needs.

Day cabs, road tractors, box trucks, straight trucks, rollbacks, tankers, service bodies, work trucks and pickups too — not a Tyson Airport thing or a quarry thing, they run everywhere.

Whatever you drive, the offer doesn’t change. We buy all of them.

• Does it have to run?No. It does have to be complete — if the engine, transmission, doors, rear ends, drive shafts, wheels or anything under the hood have been removed, we can’t buy it. Rust is not a disqualifier.
• The engine is out of it. Is that different?Yes, and that is the line. A tired engine is fine; an engine that has been pulled and sold means we can’t buy the truck.
• What about the title?We need one unless the truck is old enough that it never had one. Lost titles have a counter replacement, and where none exists there is a bonded route.
• You said the record here is thin. Does that change the offer?No. A thin row is a fact about a dataset, not about a town, and the offer depends on the truck rather than on how well anything near it was researched.
• High miles for a local truck.Not suspicious around Blount County, where 4 of 59 county bridges are posted — 6.8% against a statewide 12.9% — and the binding cap within ten miles of the Maryville pit is 17.2 tonnes. Little here forced a truck to run short or go round.
• How do you pay?Cash or electronic payment, whichever suits you.

Beyond a machine that has simply done its work, the reasons here are ordinary ones. Retiring. A medical that went the wrong way. A contract finishing and the plant that served it having nowhere to go next.

The yards around Blount County usually have one standing that never got its next job, and on the dimension-stone side at Brown Quarry that can be a specialised truck with a very short list of buyers.

Most of those aren’t happy reasons, and we don’t treat them like they are. Somebody wants a straight answer and the truck gone by the end of the week. That’s what we’re here for.