Sell your semi truck for cash in Stony Creek the easy and convenient way

This is not a stone town in the ordinary sense. Iluka Resources took titanium and zircon out of the Old Hickory deposit between 1997 and 2016, and the ore came to a dry mill at Stony Creek to be separated electrostatically and magnetically. Iluka suspended the operation in 2017 and kept the leases. As of 2024 Atlantic Strategic Minerals have restarted mining nearby.

The state permit file still carries it: permit 90370AA, Iluka Resources Inc.-Virginia, mine name Old Hickory Mine, commodity titanium, filed to Dinwiddie County.

Heavy mineral sand is processed in two stages, and the two stages are in two places. A wet concentrator works near the pit; a dry mill does the electrostatic and magnetic separation. Here that is the Concord Mine and Concentrator at Jarratt and the separation plant at Stony Creek, 10.5 miles apart.

Those 10.5 miles are the whole shape of the local truck job. It is not a highway lane and it is not a pit-to-plant crawl either — it is a short repeated shuttle on county roads, loaded one way, empty the other, several times a day.

Short cycles are hard on gear the odometer barely notices. Brakes, clutch, tyres and the frame do the work; the miles accumulate slowly. A truck with a modest reading that ran this lane for a decade has had a longer life than the number says, and that is something you know about your own truck better than any listing does.

There is a smaller crushed-stone operation here too, three people on the books, and it is a good example of why we ask rather than count. Two rows sit at the same coordinate: the quarry, and a second row named LT120-010, which is not a place at all but a Lokotrack LT120 crusher with a unit number, registered there under the Mellott Company. Mellott also holds a site at Front Royal. A machine can look like a business from the outside.

That shuttle has to cross water. Within ten miles of the quarry the national bridge file records 93 structures, five coded posted for load and four coded below legal loads. The second figure is the one to read in Virginia; the two codes agree on only about two thirds of the state’s posted structures.

The nearest of the four is 4.68 miles out, and its lowest operating rating is around sixteen and a half US tons of rating vehicle. An empty tandem dump uses up most of that on its own. What is left over for the load is about four tons, against the twenty-five or so the same truck is legally built to carry.

So a truck working Sussex County either runs a fraction loaded or goes round. Neither is dramatic and both are expensive over years, and both are invisible on the dash.

Both of those constraints sit on top of the ordinary state limits. Va. Code § 46.2-1122 puts a single axle at 20,000 lb and gross at 80,000 lb, and § 46.2-1127 puts a tandem at 34,000 lb, with Virginia’s interstate limits the same as its highway limits.

The tandem is the number that catches people who cross into North Carolina. North Carolina allows 38,000 lb on a tandem at the same 80,000 lb gross. Four thousand pounds is a lot on a dense commodity, because sand and stone hit the axle limits with the body nowhere near full — so a load that is legal one side of the line is over on the other, with the gross figure unchanged and nothing on the ticket to warn you.

There is a five per cent commodity permit at § 46.2-1129, capped at 84,000 lb, but it is written for Virginia-grown farm and forest products moved from where they were produced to where they are first processed. Mineral sand is not one of those.

Gross and single axle at Va. Code § 46.2-1122, the tandem at § 46.2-1127 and the commodity permit at § 46.2-1129; the North Carolina tandem at N.C.G.S. § 20-118. Information, not legal advice.

That is the rule, and everything past it 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.

One Virginia detail is one to know before you compare it with anywhere else. Under § 46.2-1600, a late model vehicle is salvage where the estimated cost of repair would exceed its actual cash value less its current salvage value. Every other state on file measures against the whole pre-damage figure.

Subtracting the salvage figure makes the base smaller, which makes the test easier to trip rather than harder. Anyone reading percentages side by side across states gets that backwards, and it is the sort of thing that turns up after a sale rather than before one.

Va. Code § 46.2-1600. Information, not legal advice, and only as current as the day it was read.

All of it, and out here the harder question is usually how it gets collected rather than what it is. Dump trucks and aggregate haulers off the sand. Tankers, flatbeds and day cabs. Farm trucks and grain hauls off the fields around Jarratt. Box trucks, straight trucks, service bodies and the pickups that go with a crew.

Whatever you drive, the offer doesn’t change. We buy all of them, on either end of the 10.5 miles between the Concord Mine and the separation plant.

On collection, start from the far end. We can buy it remotely and arrange the tow with nobody coming out at all, and in a place this far from a metro that is usually how it goes. If you would rather we came, we come to you and drive it away or come to you and tow it. And if you happen to be heading our way, you are welcome to bring it.

• 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.
• Will you actually come out this far?We will. But we do not need to. Plenty of trucks out here we buy remotely and have towed, and across Sussex County and up towards Dinwiddie County that is the ordinary route rather than the fallback.
• How am I paid?Cash or electronic payment. That is the whole list.
• It ran mineral sand.Then tell us. Sand loads are hard on a body and harder on a frame, and we would rather know than find out. It does not change whether we buy it.
• What about the title?We need one unless the truck is old enough that it never had one. A lost title has a counter replacement; where none exists there is a bonded route.

Beyond a plant going quiet and coming back, the reasons are personal ones. Retiring. A medical that went the wrong way. Work that moved when Iluka suspended and never quite moved back. A truck standing in a yard near the Old Hickory lease, 10.5 miles from the concentrator it used to shuttle to, with insurance going out on something that isn’t turning a wheel.

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.