We buy trucks in Cumberland City

One quarry is filed under this town, Yellow Creek Stone, working four people. It is 6.39 miles from the middle of town, taking the nearest place of that name from the Census gazetteer — farther out than any other site on this list, and far enough that “in town” and “at the quarry” are genuinely different places.

That matters for reading the rest of this page, because every distance below is measured from the quarry rather than from the town. A crossing 4.3 miles from the pit is not necessarily 4.3 miles from your yard.

MSHA Mine Data Retrieval System. U.S. Census Bureau 2024 Gazetteer Files.

Yellow Creek Stone is also the one site in this batch that is not on the state register. No approved aggregate producer lies within 5 miles of it carrying either its operator name or its town, and only what is on that list may be used on a state highway project. So the stone off this pit goes to private, county or industrial customers instead.

Now the part that is easy to get wrong, so we will say it plainly. Absence from that register is not evidence that anything has closed or gone quiet. Every record the register publishes reads status Active, which means it publishes the current list and nothing else — there is no “formerly approved” entry for a reader to fail to find. A missing row and a shut gate look identical from the outside, and we are not going to treat one as the other.

What it does change is who the customers are, and a customer base of county road departments and private jobs runs different work from one feeding a state contract: smaller loads, shorter hauls, and a fleet sized to four people rather than to a schedule.

Tennessee DOT Materials and Tests, Producer List Plants, on the five-mile operator-matched window.

Those shorter hauls still meet postings. Within ten miles of the quarry the bridge inventory records 166 structures. Twelve are coded posted for load and nine of those are county-maintained; the nearest is 4.3 miles out.

The weakest of the twelve is rated 10.7 metric tonnes, about 11.8 US tons, and that is an unusual number to find. On most sites the weakest posting is a two- or three-tonne farm crossing, well outside this trade. Here it sits a fraction under the eleven-tonne weight of an empty tandem dump — near enough the line that the distinction between “no commercial truck at all” and “an empty one only” comes down to how the particular truck is specified.

Eleven of the twelve, 92%, do clear that floor, and the lowest of those eleven is 11.7 metric tonnes, about 12.9 US tons. Over an empty tandem’s tare that admits about 0.7 tonnes of stone, against the twenty-five or so a legal 80,000 lb truck carries. It is one of the tighter figures in the state: of the 147 Tennessee sites in this research slice, only 10 have a binding crossing rated lower.

One number that looks contradictory and is not: across Houston County as a whole only 2 of 83 county-maintained bridges are posted, 2.4%. A ten-mile circle drawn from a quarry 6.39 miles out of town does not stay inside one county, so the twelve and the two are counting different things.

FHWA National Bridge Inventory 2025, Tennessee file, items 21, 41, 64 and 70.

Those 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.

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.

Those rules reach every kind of iron we buy, and around a four-person operation working county and private jobs that is a wide range. Tandem dumps and aggregate haulers off the pit 6.39 miles out. The loader and the service truck that go with a crew that size.

Day cabs, road tractors, box trucks, straight trucks, flatbeds, rollbacks, tankers, service bodies, work trucks and pickups as well — not a Houston County thing in particular, 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.
• We’re not really in town.Most people here aren’t. The quarry itself is 6.39 miles out and Houston County spreads well past the town line. Give us the address the truck is actually at and that is what we work from.
• Do you have to come out?No. We’ll drive it away, we’ll tow it, or we’ll buy it where it stands and arrange the tow with nobody coming out at all. Bringing it to us also works.
• The bridge on our road is posted.Twelve are, within ten miles of the quarry, and the weakest is rated 10.7 metric tonnes — about the weight of an empty tandem dump and no more. Getting the truck out from behind it is our problem to solve, not yours.
• How do you pay?Cash or electronic payment, whichever suits you.

None of that is usually the reason. The reasons here are ordinary ones. Retiring. A medical that went the wrong way. A county job finishing and the truck that served it having nowhere to go next.

On a crew of four that last one is severe. One person stopping is a quarter of the operation, and Houston County is not a place with a queue of outfits waiting to take on a spare tandem 6.39 miles outside a town of this size. The truck just stands there.

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.