We buy trucks in Kimball

Two rows are filed under this town and they are different trades under different owners. Kelly Cove is carried as a surface operation working Dimension Stone, mine 4003483, with four people on it. The second row works construction sand and gravel with ten.

Marion County around them is one of the denser stone counties in this state: 19 filed rows, running from a cement plant and crushed-stone quarries down to a scatter of small dimension-stone and sand operations, several of them working three or four people.

Kelly Cove is the southern end of the Cumberland Plateau building-stone district — twenty quarries under about seventeen operators and 149 people between them, spread across Cumberland, Bledsoe, Rhea and Marion counties, which this list splits across eight separate town names. Kimball is the Marion County end of it, and Chattanooga is about 60 miles south.

That district works Crab Orchard stone, a sandstone from the Cumberland Plateau — predominantly rose, mottled and streaked with brown, and a named American building stone with a documented history. It went into the Cumberland County courthouse and Crossville’s curbing, and reached a national reputation in the mid-1920s when it was used as the primary material for Scarritt College in Nashville.

It ships as flagstone, field stone, stack stone and sawn building stone, all of it palletised, into a market that is part construction and part landscaping. The landscaping half is what matters for freight: landscape stone goes to garden centres, contractors and yards rather than to fabricators, which means many small drops rather than a few large ones.

Flagstone and field stone are irregular, hand-stacked and banded rather than sawn to dimension, so securement works against the shifting of an irregular mass rather than the restraint of a regular one. That is an inference from the product rather than a statement about how these two operators work.

Which is where the honest answer runs out. There is no published tonnage for this district, and headcount does not stand in for it: in a comparable district measured properly, output ran from 0.05 to 4.8 loads on a working day across operations of four to eleven people, with almost no relationship between the two.

So whether these Marion County rows are busy operations or occasional ones is not established, and this page will not pretend otherwise. Nor is local demand for used equipment: seventeen operators is a real cluster of businesses, but whether it is a real cluster of trucks is unknown.

What can be said is where wear shows on palletised freight — tine marks and pallet-corner crush on the deck, and heavier consumption of strapping and edge protection on irregular stone. And because the Cumberland Plateau rock here is sandstone rather than limestone, it is quartz-bearing, so it carries the silica exposure profile the mine regulator’s rule is aimed at. That is a property of the material; no measured exposure at either site was found and none is claimed.

Whichever road a loaded truck takes off this plateau, the weight statute over it gives building stone nothing.

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. Flat decks and stone trailers off Kelly Cove, the tractors that pull them, and the loaders and haul units that work the wet ground on the sand and gravel side.

Day cabs, road tractors, box trucks, straight trucks, flatbeds, rollbacks, tankers, service bodies, work trucks, tandem dumps and pickups too — not a Marion 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.
• The deck is marked up from the forklift.Expected on palletised stone off Kelly Cove and not a disqualifier. Tine marks and crushed pallet corners are what this work looks like.
• It worked the sand pit rather than the stone.Both are ours. Marion County has nineteen filed operations across several trades and we buy the trucks off any of them.
• How do you pay?Cash or electronic payment, whichever suits you.

Beyond a machine that has simply done its work, the reasons here are ordinary ones. Retiring. A medical that went the wrong way. A four-person operation losing the one person who drove.

The yards around Marion County, from Kelly Cove out towards the Chattanooga 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.