Dickson County
Nothing is posted within six miles of this quarry
One quarry is filed under this city, working 13 people, 2.69 miles from the middle of it. The state carries it as approved aggregate producer 32200005, a Vulcan Materials plant, and the coordinate the register publishes lands 0.31 miles from ours — close enough to confirm we are describing the same pit.
The first useful number is a distance rather than a weight. Within ten miles of that quarry the bridge inventory records 157 structures, and only six of them are coded posted for load. The nearest is 6.1 miles away, which is farther than at any other site on this list. A truck leaving this pit is on open road for the first six miles in any direction.
FHWA National Bridge Inventory 2025, Tennessee file. Tennessee DOT Materials and Tests, Producer List Plants. MSHA Mine Data Retrieval System.
The middle of the state
On the one measure we can rank, this site is the median
That said, six miles out the postings start, and the binding one is rated 15.2 metric tonnes, about 16.8 US tons. Over the roughly eleven tonnes an empty tandem dump already weighs, that admits about 4.2 tonnes of stone, against the twenty-five or so a legal 80,000 lb truck carries.
What makes 15.2 worth pausing on is where it falls. Across the 147 Tennessee sites in this research slice, 70 have a tighter binding crossing and 67 have a looser one. This is the median figure for the state, near enough exactly. Whatever a Tennessee quarry truck typically has to work around, this is it.
Read the cap as a minimum inside ten miles rather than a promise about a whole route: at 64.1% of the sites in this slice a tighter crossing turns up somewhere between ten miles and twenty. Dickson County itself posts 5 of its 164 county-maintained bridges, 3.0%, so the county is not the source of the constraint.
Reading the postings
Two of the six are not about trucks like these at all
Those six postings are not six versions of the same thing, and the gap between them is wider here than at most sites. Only four of the six carry an operating rating at or above the eleven-tonne floor — 67% of them, the lowest share in this batch, where the other sites run from 86% to every posting clearing it.
The other two are a different kind of structure. The weakest is rated 4.9 metric tonnes, about 5.4 US tons, which is well under the weight of an empty tandem. No commercial vehicle crosses it loaded or empty, so it is not a cap on a load at all — it is a crossing outside this trade entirely, and quoting it as the local limit would be misleading.
Four of the six are county-maintained. That is the practical reading: a third of what a map shows as posted around here is not a constraint on a working truck, and the number that is one sits 6.1 miles out.
Tennessee weight law
Eleven trades get a margin. Stone is not one of them
All six 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 reach every kind of iron we buy, and with 157 structures inside ten miles of the quarry that is a wide range. Tandem dumps and aggregate haulers off the pit 2.69 miles out, running the 6.1 miles of open road before the first posting. Plant trucks, water trucks and the loaders that go with a thirteen-person operation.
Day cabs, road tractors, box trucks, straight trucks, flatbeds, rollbacks, tankers, service bodies, work trucks and pickups as well — not a Dickson County thing in particular, they run everywhere.
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 Dickson
- 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.
- Somebody told me the local limit is five tons.That will be the 4.9-tonne crossing, and it is not a limit on a truck — it is under the weight of an empty tandem, so nothing commercial uses it either way. The crossing that actually caps a load around here is rated 15.2 metric tonnes and sits 6.1 miles from the quarry.
- 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.
- It has high miles on it.Not a problem, and around here it is the expected shape. The county posts 3.0% of its county-maintained bridges and the quarry 2.69 miles out has open road in every direction, so trucks working from it run roads rather than detours.
- 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 13 at a quarry 2.69 miles out of town there is a sharper version: one person stops and the truck they drove is standing the next morning with nobody to take it on. Dickson County has work — it posts 3.0% of its county bridges and is rebuilding rather than winding down — but work in a county is not the same as a seat for one particular truck.
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.