Dump Truck Advise

Well after spending months asking the veterans here for advise on who to drive for, I'm going to end up in Indiana driving my grandfathers coal truck.

He has a complete blockage of the right carotid which has affected his vision and they say it will never come back.

He runs an International 9200 Tractor with a 40ft Frameless dump and he has told my mom that if I come up he's going to look at buying some more trucks.

So my question to those experienced guys is would you look at buying more of the 40ft dumps and tractors or just buying straight trucks with quad axles on the back?

Around that part of the state there are several companies that run both kinds of trucks, and in the past we have run Tri-Axles but never quads and since I will be doing most of the maintenance and repairs (We have always done everything but major repairs) I also want to have trucks that are low on maintenance as well.

 

For now we're going to be hauling coal, possibly buying a road tractor or two but my thoughts with the quad axle were, it leaves us options because we can haul stuff with it that then we can with a T/T, such as road construction or aggregate and such.

The longest we go is probably only 30 miles from the home location

 

Mostly just on beds of coal dust is what we dump on. Every body uses 40' from less so there's no question with trailer length.

I need to double check the Indiana law on coal haulers, to make sure that I have it rigjt before I say it.

I can't remember what we use to scale our Tri-axles at (Steer, single life, tandem drives) but when we had them we always had three feet of wood boards held up on the sides of the bed to increase capacity.
The quad axle guys (Steer, Tandem lift, tandem drive) use them but only like a foot.