We buy trucks in Rogersville

MSHA records 2 employees at the quarry filed under this town, operated by Vulcan Construction Materials, LLC. Its coordinates lie 3.73 miles from the Census 2024 Gazetteer centroid, out where the stone is.

That distance is the whole story of this record. The original join looked for an approved TDOT producer within two miles of the node, found none, and wrote down that the operation was not approved for state highway work. Widening the window to five miles while requiring both the operator name and the town to agree recovers the match: producer 13700008, at 3.56 miles.

So the operation IS approved, and the earlier reading was an artefact of the radius rather than a fact about the quarry. Seven Tennessee rows sat in that position and five of them carried the mistaken claim. We are stating the corrected version because the wrong one is the kind that quietly follows a truck around.

Those roads are worth reading separately from the register. Within ten miles of the quarry the FHWA National Bridge Inventory 2025 file for Tennessee records 119 structures, of which 17 carry a load posting on item 41 — and 13 of those are county-maintained, which is a high share.

The nearest posted crossing is 3.6 miles out and the lowest operating rating among them is 2.9 metric tonnes. Fourteen of the seventeen rate at 11.0 metric tonnes or better, and the lowest at or above that commercial floor is 13.9 metric tonnes, which is what actually caps a loaded vehicle here.

Across Hawkins County as a whole, 17 of 92 county-maintained bridges are posted, 18.5%. And the usual caution applies: only 42% of Tennessee’s item-41 bridges also fail item 70, so the real count of crossings that would change a haul is lower than seventeen.

That split between county and state maintenance is the useful thing on this page. Thirteen county-maintained postings inside ten miles means the local network, not the highway network, is where a loaded truck spends its awkward miles.

This ground sits in the Ridge and Valley province, where the rock has weathered into long parallel ridges and valleys running north-east to south-west, and the roads follow that grain. Routes along a valley run straight; routes across it climb and descend a ridge every few miles. Haul cost and haul distance come apart accordingly.

For a machine off the Vulcan Construction Materials ground in Hawkins County, that reads as brakes, cooling and driveline carrying more than the odometer shows, and a suspension that has spent its life on county surfaces rather than state ones.

Those crossings set one limit on a load. The statute sets the other, and it is the same everywhere.

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.

Beyond the weight rules, the paperwork is one sentence.

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 Vulcan Construction Materials ground, and the plant trucks that keep a small crushing operation running.

Day cabs, road tractors, box trucks, straight trucks, flatbeds, rollbacks, tankers, service bodies, work trucks and pickups too — not a Hawkins 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.
• Somebody told me this pit was not on the state list.That was a records error from too tight a search radius, since corrected — the Vulcan Construction Materials operation is producer 13700008. It does not change what your truck is worth to us either way.
• It has run county roads its whole life.Normal here, where 13 of the 17 postings inside ten miles are county-maintained. Across Hawkins County that shows in suspension and frame rather than in the mileage.
• How do you pay?Cash or electronic payment, whichever suits you.

Beyond a machine that has simply done its jobs, 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 the Vulcan Construction Materials ground and out across Hawkins County 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. We can come and drive it away, come and tow it, or buy it where it stands and arrange the tow with no visit at all.