Limestone County
The biggest crushed-stone row in the county is portable
Two crushed-stone operations attach to Mexia and the larger one is not a fixed quarry at all. It is carried as a portable plant, and at 50 employees it is the biggest crushed-stone row in a county that holds seven of them.
A portable plant of that size is a substantial travelling operation rather than a machine on a trailer. Its registration picture fits: no active state aggregate registration within a mile, the nearest 13.3 miles away, which is what a plant that moves tends to look like on a register built around fixed sites.
The second operation is the Skyhigh Pit at 11 employees, and that one is anchored — an active registration sits 0.33 miles away under the Sky High name, working limestone.
So one fleet travels and one does not, in the same county
Those two operations put two different kinds of truck on the same roads, which is unusual in a place this size.
The portable side runs lowboys and tractors that move plant, plus haulers that follow the crusher to wherever it sets up. The Skyhigh side runs the ordinary pit pattern: short loaded trips, all day, from the same gate.
It means the trucks that come up for sale here vary more than the county’s size suggests, and the mileage on two of them can mean completely different things. The Skyhigh Pit is anchored while the portable plant sits 13.3 miles from the nearest registered site.
Texas weight law
One ceiling, and a permit list that skips stone
Both patterns sit under one statutory ceiling, and limestone is not on the relief list.
Texas sets gross weight at 80,000 lb, a single axle at 20,000 lb and a tandem at 34,000 lb — the plain federal figures, with no commodity variance of the kind Georgia and Kentucky grant.
What Texas grants instead is permits, and each one is written for a named industry: ready-mixed concrete, fluid milk, timber, and super heavy single-trip. There is no permit named for aggregate, stone, sand or quarry products. So a stone hauler here gets the general permit and nothing else, while a ready-mix truck sits on the list — two trades a reader might treat as one, on opposite sides of the line.
The general permit adds ten per cent on the axle and five per cent on gross, and it comes with a bond and liability for actual damage to load-restricted roads. On a load-zoned road the permitted weight is ten per cent less than the maximum, so those two percentages run in opposite directions and must never be added together.
Tex. Transp. Code § 621.101; Chapter 623 permits. Information, not legal advice.
Texas paperwork
We need a title — unless it never had one
Beyond the weight rules, the paperwork comes down to 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. Both are ordinary and neither stops a sale.
One Texas rule is worth knowing because it runs further than any other state on file. Texas brands a truck salvage only where the cost of repairs exceeds the actual cash value before the damage — effectively one hundred per cent, against eighty in Florida and sixty in Oklahoma. And it is a two-part test, not pure arithmetic: there must also be damage to, or a missing, major component part.
The statute lists thirteen major component parts, and the calculation leaves out repainting and sales tax, which no other state on file excludes. For a truck whose damage is mostly cosmetic that moves the answer a long way.
Tex. Transp. Code § 501.091. Information, not legal advice, and only as current as the date the rule file was last verified.
What we buy here
All of that iron is iron we buy. Lowboys and the tractors that move plant off the portable work. Dump trucks and aggregate haulers off the Skyhigh Pit. Day cabs, flatbeds, rollbacks, box trucks, straight trucks, service bodies, and the work trucks and pickups that go with a crew.
A travelling plant turns equipment over on its own schedule, so there is usually something coming free somewhere in the county.
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. The Sky High registration and the other Limestone County rows are where most of it turns up.
Straight answers
The questions we get asked in Mexia
- 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.
- It followed a portable plant around for years.Then it has real highway miles as well as pit hours, and we would like to hear about both.
- The box is beaten up but the driveline is good.That is the normal shape of a Skyhigh Pit truck and it is not a problem.
- What about the title?We need one unless the truck is old enough that it never had one. Lost titles have a counter replacement; where none exists there’s a bonded route.
- Do you have to come out to look at it?Not necessarily. We can come to you and drive it away, come and tow it, buy it remotely and arrange the tow, or you can drive it to us. Whichever suits the truck and your week. Limestone County carries seven crushed-stone rows and the Skyhigh Pit is one of them.
Why people call
Beyond a plant moving on to the next job, the reasons are personal ones. Retiring. A medical that went the wrong way. A truck sitting since a contract ended.
Yards around the Skyhigh Pit road usually have one waiting.
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. The Skyhigh Pit sits 0.33 miles from its registration and the portable side moves on.