We buy trucks in Farragut

Vulcan works the Dixie Lee Quarry with twenty-two people on it, which makes it a proper plant rather than a pit with a loader. The state register carries it as approved aggregate producer 14700040, matched to our coordinate at 0.24 miles — but it lists the name as “Vulcan Materials - Knoxville Everett Rd”.

The mine regulator, for its part, gives the nearest town as Concord. Our list files it under Farragut, 3.38 miles from the middle of town. Dixie Lee, Everett Road, Concord, Farragut: one operation, four labels, and the reason this page says so is that a seller looking for their own pit should not have to guess.

Twenty-two people also means a maintenance system rather than a mechanic. That usually shows in a machine as records, scheduled parts and a service history that did not depend on one person remembering.

Within ten miles of the quarry the inventory records 195 structures and 10 are posted for load — but only 2 of those are county-maintained. The nearest is 3.5 miles out.

That split is the useful part. Most of the restriction around here sits on state and city structures rather than on the small county roads a quarry actually uses to reach a job, which is the reverse of the pattern further east in this state.

The lowest raw rating in the set is 2.9 metric tonnes, about 3.2 US tons. That is not a commercial crossing under any reading — an empty tandem dump weighs nearly four times it — so it tells you nothing about a working truck. The figure that binds one is 19.1 metric tonnes, about 21.1 US tons, which leaves room for roughly 8.1 tonnes of stone over an empty tandem’s eleven.

Knox County posts 9 of its 131 county-maintained bridges, 6.9 per cent against a statewide county-maintained rate of 12.9.

FHWA National Bridge Inventory 2025, Tennessee file, items 21, 41, 64 and 70. Operating rating is the gross weight of the rating vehicle. Tennessee codes item 41 more broadly than neighbouring states, so the true count of load restrictions is lower than the posted count suggests.

Those two figures together describe a pit whose trucks were not forced into detours or part loads. The miles on a Dixie Lee machine were mostly miles carrying something.

That makes this one of the easier pages in this lane to read a machine on. Where a Carter County truck has an odometer that overstates the work and a Hickman County truck has one that understates it, a Farragut truck’s reads about right.

The thing to ask about instead is the cycle. A twenty-two-person operation under a national producer replaces equipment to a plan rather than at end of life, so a machine can come up for sale in good order and at a defined age — and the caution that goes with that is real. A scheduled-replacement truck was used to a plan; it was not spared.

Those roads sit under a statute that hands this trade nothing extra, however easy they are.

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.

Tenn. Code § 47-26-812 adds an axle-citation shield and five hundred pounds for a natural resources load, from a weights-and-measures chapter about certified public weighers rather than the motor vehicle code. Off the interstate again.

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. § 55-7-203 and § 55-7-104, and Tenn. Code § 47-26-812, as summarised by the University of Tennessee County Technical Assistance Service. Information, not legal advice.

Past the weight rules, the paperwork is one sentence: we need a title unless the truck is old enough that it never had one.

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.

All of that iron is iron we buy. Tandem dumps and aggregate haulers off the Dixie Lee Quarry, and the plant trucks that go with a twenty-two-person operation.

Day cabs, road tractors, box trucks, straight trucks, flatbeds, rollbacks, tankers, service bodies, work trucks and pickups too — not a Knox 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.
• It came off Everett Road, not Dixie Lee.Same operation. The register and the mine file use different names for it.
• It was replaced on a schedule, not because it failed.Normal for a pit this size and not a problem for us. It does mean the machine was worked to a plan rather than nursed, so tell us what you know about its last service.
• How do you pay?Cash or electronic payment, whichever suits you.

Beyond a machine that has simply reached its replacement date, 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 Knox County, from the Dixie Lee Quarry out towards Everett Road, usually have one standing that never got its next job.

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. That’s what we’re here for.