Campbell County
Twelve of the fourteen posted crossings take a truck. Only part loaded
One quarry is filed under this town, working 16 people, and the roads around it are measured rather than guessed at. Within ten miles of that pit the bridge inventory records 124 structures. Fourteen are coded posted for load and five of those are county-maintained. The nearest is 0.8 miles out.
The raw worst of the fourteen is rated 7.5 metric tonnes, about 8.3 US tons, which is under the weight of an empty tandem dump and therefore not a cap on a load — it is a crossing no commercial truck uses at all. Twelve of the fourteen, 86% of them, are rated at or above that eleven-tonne floor, and the lowest of those twelve is 13.3 metric tonnes, about 14.7 US tons. That is the number that binds a loaded vehicle here.
It is a tight one. Over the roughly eleven tonnes an empty tandem already weighs, 13.3 leaves about 2.3 tonnes for the stone, against the twenty-five or so a legal 80,000 lb truck carries. Read it as an upper bound inside a ten-mile circle rather than a promise about any particular route.
FHWA National Bridge Inventory 2025, Tennessee file, items 21, 41, 64 and 70. MSHA Mine Data Retrieval System.
One corridor, and it climbs
The constraint here is grade, not crossings
That cap is not, in the end, what shapes hauling around here. Campbell County sits where Interstate 75 climbs the Cumberland Mountain to Jellico Gap and crosses into Kentucky. The mountain has few other ways through, so the county’s roads are organised around that single corridor: sustained climbs, sustained descents, and a market that runs north over the gap and south toward Knoxville along one road.
The county’s own network is thin rather than restricted. Only 74 of its bridges are county-maintained and six of those are posted, 8.1%, which ranks 52nd among Tennessee’s 92 comparable counties — the middle of the state, not the bad end of it. What wears a truck out around here is the climb, not the detour.
The Kentucky line is close enough that a loaded truck crosses it in an ordinary day, and the law changes when it does. Kentucky names crushed stone first on the commodity list earning a ten per cent weight tolerance under KRS 189.222(1)(c). Tennessee omits it. The same load is tolerated on one side of the gap and not the other.
Where the register and the map disagreed
We had this pit filed as not approved for state work, and that was wrong
The state publishes a Producer List, and only what is on it may be used on a state highway job. This operation is on it — approved aggregate producer 10700003, carried as a Rogers Group aggregate plant — so stone off this pit supplies Tennessee highway work.
We nearly recorded the opposite. The register is joined to the pit by coordinate, and the approved plant sits 3.49 miles from it, outside the two-mile window the join originally used. Under that window the pit came back as not approved. It was not the radius that was the mistake so much as the shape of the rule: a tight window with no name test produces false positives and false negatives both, and a wide window that also requires the operator name and the town to agree produces neither. Seven rows in this state were in that position and five of them had already carried the wrong claim.
We are telling you because it is the kind of error that would otherwise sit on a page looking like a fact. The pit itself is 3.76 miles from the middle of town, taking the nearest place of that name from the Census gazetteer.
Tennessee DOT Materials and Tests, Producer List Plants. U.S. Census Bureau 2024 Gazetteer Files.
Tennessee weight law
Eleven trades get a margin. Stone is not one of them
Both the climb and the crossings sit under one statute, and it 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) deems weight restrictions to carry a ten per cent margin of error for logging, sand, coal, clay, shale, phosphate, solid waste, recovered materials, farm trucks and machinery trucks, off the interstate system only. Crushed stone is absent from that list, 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 has been reduced into compliance or a permit obtained, and failing to comply is itself a Class C misdemeanour. It is not fined and waved on. It stops.
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 short. 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
Those rules cover every kind of iron we buy, and on a corridor like this one that is a wide range. Tandem dumps and aggregate haulers off the pit 3.76 miles out. Plant trucks and the water trucks that go with them. Road tractors that run the Jellico Gap climb loaded one way and empty the other.
Day cabs, box trucks, straight trucks, flatbeds, rollbacks, tankers, service bodies, work trucks and pickups as well — not a Campbell County thing in particular, they run everywhere, including over the state line and back.
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 Caryville
- 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.
- Do you have to come out here?No, and Campbell County is not a hard place to reach anyway — the interstate runs through it. We’ll drive it away, we’ll tow it, or we’ll buy it where it stands and arrange the tow without anyone coming out. Driving it to us works too. Whichever of those suits you is the one we do.
- It won’t cross the bridge at the end of the road.Quite possibly, and it does not matter to us. The crossing 0.8 miles from the pit is posted, and the lowest one a commercial truck can use at all is rated 13.3 metric tonnes. Getting it out is our problem, not yours.
- It runs into Kentucky.Ordinary here — Jellico Gap is the way north and the market goes with it. Crossing the line does not change whether we buy the truck.
- 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 contract finishing and the truck that served it having nowhere to go next.
On a crew of 16 working a pit 3.76 miles out of town there is a sharper version: one person stops and a sixteenth of the operation stops with them, and the truck that person drove is standing the next morning with nobody to take it on. Campbell County does not offer many places for it to go instead — the work is on one corridor, and the next pit up the road is over Jellico Gap in another state.
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.