Services & rates
The road sheet
Pit-owned aggregate, owned iron, owned trucks — the sheet is short because the chain is short. Every line is the stone, the haul, the compaction and the crown, in one number.
The 2026 sheet
New private road, built whole$14.50–19 / lin ft
Subgrade proofed, geotextile where wet, 8-in two-lift base, 2% crown, ditches tied
Lane rebuild, in place$9.80 / lin ft
Old surface and base reclaimed, regraded and re-compacted, new crown cut
Farm approach & field enterfrom $2,400
Culvert set or replaced, apron stoned, grade held to the county maximum
Culvert work, standing alonefrom $1,150
End sections, headwalls and bedding — the pipe is the road’s warranty
Aggregate delivered, pit-runfrom $21 / yd³
3/4-minus, blends and screened fill — our trucks, our scale, your tipping report
Trucking & equipment, hourlyfrom $118 / hr
End-dumps, water truck, dozer and roller with operators
3/4-minus base
The road stone, crushed and washed at the pit: two compacted lifts of it under every run we sign, moisture-corrected and rolled to 95 percent standard Proctor. Sold by the yard for your own builds, scaled on the pit bridge with a ticket for every load.
Screened fill
Pit-run and screened to minus three inches for building up low ground, filling old foundations and backfilling behind walls — placed, moisture-corrected and compacted to 95 percent standard Proctor when we place it, and sold loose at the scale when you do.
Crusher-run blend
Coarse run with fines left in, for wet-season tracks, yard pads and the first lift on soft ground — it knits, it drains, and it costs less than anything else that carries a truck. The farmer’s gravel, and half the Winrow belt is standing on it.
Walk the alignment
The route booted end to end: soils read at the soft stretches, drainage traced to where it wants to go, and the cut-and-fill balance sketched on the tailgate before anything moves.
Balance the earthworks
Cuts scheduled to feed fills — the roadbed built from its own ditch spoil wherever the arithmetic allows, and the truckloads that never ran are the cheapest ones on the job.
Water first, always
Culverts set, ditches cut to a fall, and the low stretches underdrained before a stone is placed. A road that cannot drain was built twice, once badly.
Two lifts of base
Eight inches total in two compacted passes — each lift watered, rolled and checked to 95 percent Proctor, the crown cut at two percent the whole run.
Top & tie
Surface stone to suit the traffic, approaches crowned to the county grade, and the first rain watched on site with you — the road’s first storm is its real inspection.
The sequence
How a road gets built out of a hole
The pit, the dozer and the trucks are all ours, so the sequence is the whole company on one alignment: earthworks balanced in the middle, water handled before the stone, and the base laid in two lifts that each get their own pass of the roller. A road built in this order is boring forever after — which is the point of roads.
2025 — 2026
The pit wall
Six runs and loads from the last two seasons. Four of these roads carry school buses now, which is the review that matters on the Winrow belt.
Build season runs May to freeze-up · pit loads six to five, Saturdays to noon · (555) 056-8823 · pit@milkvaleroadbed.example
One fleet, one clock
The trucks are ours, and it shows on the sheet
Brokered trucking is where road quotes go to become road invoices: somebody else’s schedule, somebody else’s rate, and a fuel surcharge with your name on it. Every axle that serves a Milkvale road is on our clock, insured on our policy, and printed on one sheet you signed at the start.
Roads and their owners
The Winrow belt says
Our lane was a Clayton county joke — two feet of mudshirt every spring. Milkvale balanced the cut into the fill, laid two lifts of their own base, crowned the whole run and set the culvert before the stone, exactly in that order. Three Aprils later the school bus turns around at our gate without slowing down.
The quote came with the cut-and-fill arithmetic on it — I could see where every yard was coming from and where it was going. The low bid trucked; Milkvale walked the dirt across the site and billed me for the walking. The road is four years old and dead flat.
We buy base by the load for the farm tracks and the scale ticket has never once argued with the sheet. Crusher-run on the wet stretches, 3/4-minus on the pads, their trucks, their driver who knows which gate opens which way. A pit that runs its own scale honestly is worth twenty dollars a load.
The four regulars
Asked at the pit gate
The four every road call starts with. If yours is not here, the scale house answers six to five and Saturdays to noon, and the person in it has built road in your township.
Why does a private road cost by the foot?
Because a road is a system with a length — subgrade, base, crown, ditches and culverts, all of them repeating. A per-foot price forces the arithmetic into the open: you can compare quotes line by line, and you can see exactly what the cheaper quote stopped including at the point it got cheaper.
How thick should the base actually be?
Eight inches compacted for car and pickup traffic on decent ground, more where the buses or the grain trucks run or the subgrade is soft — and always in two lifts, because a roller reaches honest density through about four inches at a pass. A single eight-inch dump compacts at the top and stays loose at the bottom, and loose at the bottom is where roads go to die.
What does balancing the job really save?
On a rolling alignment, regularly a third of the earthwork cost. Every yard of ditch cut that becomes roadbed fill is a yard that was not loaded, hauled, tipped and replaced with bought stone — and on the Winrow hills, the arithmetic is usually visible from the kitchen window. The balance sheet rides on the quote.
Do you build in the wet part of the season?
Foundations of a road, yes — culverts, underdrain and the first lift on firm ground. Finishing base in a soaking week compacts wet, and wet-compacted base is what frost heaves for a living. We sequence around the sky instead of arguing with it, and the sheet price survives the reschedule.
May build calendar opens in March · pit loads six to five, Saturdays to noon · (555) 056-8823
Bring the alignment, take the arithmetic
Length, what it carries and what the ground does in a wet month. We walk it, balance the cut against the fill, and the sheet is the quote — stone, haul, compaction and crown in one number. pit@milkvaleroadbed.example