Dickson County
The pit is in the town, and it sells to everybody except the state
One quarry is filed under this town and it is genuinely here: the coordinate sits 0.87 miles from the town centroid. Of the 140 quarry rows in this state that carry the figure the median is 3.6 miles, and only twelve sit closer to their own town than this one does. MSHA records 5 employees on it.
It is not on TDOT’s approved producer list. No approved aggregate source bearing its operator or its town lies within five miles of it, so the stone does not go into state highway work. Every record in that register reads active, so absence is not evidence a source has closed — what it establishes is who the customers are: private, county and industrial rather than the state.
A crew of five running for county and private buyers is a particular kind of operation. The work arrives when somebody is building, not when a contract schedules it, so the trucks run in bursts and then stand. Idle time is the part of that history the odometer never records.
The road network
The county posts almost nothing, and most of what it does is here
Those county customers are also the authority that posts the bridges, which makes the numbers here worth putting side by side. Across the county as a whole, 5 of 164 county-maintained bridges are posted — 3.0%, against a statewide county-maintained rate of 12.9%, and among the lowest rates in the state.
Within ten miles of the pit the inventory records 183 structures, of which 8 are coded posted for load. Six of those eight are county-maintained. So a county that posts almost nothing has concentrated most of what it does post inside this one circle, and the nearest of them is 5.5 miles out — further from the pit than the nearest posting at any other node in this batch.
The lowest raw rating among the eight is 4.9 metric tonnes, which is below an empty tandem dump and therefore not a crossing this trade uses at all. Six of the eight clear the eleven-tonne commercial floor, and the lowest of those, 15.2 tonnes or about 16.8 US tons, is the cap that binds a loaded truck — roughly 4.2 tonnes of stone over an empty tandem’s tare, against the twenty-five a legal 80,000 lb truck carries.
FHWA National Bridge Inventory 2025, Tennessee file, items 41, 64 and 70, and the TDOT Materials and Tests Producer List.
So the first five and a half miles are the easy ones
Those two figures together describe a fairly specific working life. Nothing binds a loaded truck inside 5.5 miles of the pit, and beyond that the crossings that do bind are mostly county bridges rather than state ones.
What that produces is a short-haul operation with a hard edge on it. Local deliveries ran full and their mileage means what it says. Anything reaching past that edge either ran part loaded to clear a 15.2-tonne cap or went round, and going round in Dickson County means real extra miles on a road network built for a 3.0% posting rate rather than for detours.
Both patterns leave the same number on the odometer and a different amount of wear behind it. Telling us which one a truck did tells you more than the reading itself does.
Tennessee weight law
Eleven trades get a margin. Stone is not one of them
Those caps sit under a statute that gives this trade no margin of its own.
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.
Tennessee paperwork
We need a title — unless it never had one
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.
What we buy here
Both of those cover every kind of iron we buy, and around a pit 0.87 miles from the middle of town that is a wide range. Tandem dumps and aggregate haulers off it. Articulated haulers and the plant trucks that move between private jobs.
Day cabs, road tractors, box trucks, straight trucks, flatbeds, rollbacks, tankers, service bodies, work trucks and pickups too — not a Dickson County thing in particular, they run everywhere, including out past the crossing 5.5 miles away.
Whatever you drive, the offer doesn’t change. We buy all of them.
We buy complete trucks. If the engine, transmission, doors, rear ends, drive shafts, wheels or anything under the hood have been removed, we can’t buy it. Small things — a missing bumper — are fine.
Straight answers
The questions we get asked in Burns
- 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.
- It sat between jobs.Ordinary on a pit selling to private and county buyers rather than to the state, and not a disqualifier. Sitting perishes seals, hoses and batteries rather than the expensive parts. Tell us when it last ran.
- Low miles for its age.Common here. With the pit 0.87 miles from the middle of town and nothing binding a load inside 5.5 miles, a lot of the work is short. Hours and condition tell you more than the reading does.
- How do you pay?Cash or electronic payment, whichever suits you.
Why people call
None of that is usually the reason. The reasons here are ordinary ones. Retiring. A medical that went the wrong way. A job finishing and the plant that served it having nowhere to go next.
On a crew of 5 selling into private work there is a sharper version: the building stops, one person stops with it, and a truck that was busy for three years is standing 0.87 miles from the middle of town with nothing booked. Dickson County keeps posting 3.0% of its bridges either way.
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.