For over 80 years, Pete Lien & Sons has been in the business of producing materials – everything from limestone for highways and lime for steel mills to calcium carbonate for food and gravel for infrastructure. What started in 1944 as a single quarry outside Rapid City, South Dakota – founded to support a local military base and the I-90 Interstate – has grown into a fourth-generation, family-owned natural resources company with active operations across South Dakota, Wyoming, and Colorado.
Their mission is clear: Enthusiastically developing essential resources to sustain our aspiring communities.
Unsurprisingly, rail is critical to fulfilling that mission. Moving bulk materials like lime and crushed stone across multiple states requires reliable rail service. Which means, for Pete Lien & Sons, railcar coordination is a daily operational priority.
Manual Tracking is Not a Strategy
As with many industrial rail shippers, Pete Lien & Sons team was manually managing their freight. Before partnering with Telegraph, Logistics Coordinators were logging into multiple Class I railroad websites, maintaining their own spreadsheets, and figuring out shipment statuses from a patchwork of portals and various data sources. Every booking, ETA, and update had to be found individually and then pieced together to determine what was happening operationally for any given railcar. If one of their customers needed information on a delivery window or even just a simple status update, someone had to go out and find the answer themselves.
This isn’t just a Pete Lien & Sons problem – industry-wide rail shippers face the exact same challenges. Rail freight visibility has historically required shippers to work across multiple disconnected systems. Piecing it all together has tended to fall on the people doing the day-to-day work to keep operations running smoothly.
This manual workload wasn’t just inefficient for the Pete Lien team, it constrained them when it came to both proactively serving their customers and feeling confident in the information they were providing.
Every Single Waybill Booking in One Platform
Today, 100% of Pete Lien & Sons waybills are automatically created and processed via Telegraph. Having fully transitioned their booking workflow into Telegraph, the Pete Lien & Sons operations team is using saved shipment patterns and structures that make repeat bookings faster and simpler. Instead of navigating to individual railroad websites to waybill each shipment, they manage the entire process on one screen.
“Before Telegraph, every booking meant logging into a different railroad’s website and starting from scratch every time even for repeat shipments. Now, I open one platform, pull up a saved pattern, and it’s done. It sounds like a simple change, but when you’re managing that volume every single day, it changes everything,” Teresa Wilcox, Logistics Coordinator, notes.
Telegraph’s booking product is built specifically for the way rail shippers actually work, with the repeat patterns, multi-railroad relationships, and high shipment volumes that define operations like Pete Lien’s & Sons. The platform integrates directly with Class I and shortline railroads so that rail coordinators aren’t spending their days jumping from one railroad website to the next just to solve a single problem.
The Weekend Shift No One Had to Work
Integrated waybilling only tells a portion of the Pete Lien & Sons story when it comes to leveraging technology to better serve their rail customers. Automated reporting has entirely eliminated manual data entry. The team now receives scheduled reports, including ETA updates, delivered directly to their customers on a set schedule. More than 350 reports have been auto-sent since going live, including on weekends when no one is sitting at a desk chasing down shipments.
“The automated reporting changed our whole dynamic with customers. They used to have to call us for updates. Now, they’re getting ETAs sent directly to them on a schedule. We’re not chasing information anymore. It just arrives so that our customers can feel confident in their planning,” Amanda Farmer, Logistics Coordinator, explains.
The platform also helps the team stay ahead of demurrage, helping them avoid the costly fees that accumulate when railcars sit for too long at any given facility. Better visibility means fewer surprises and fewer missed pickup windows, which, overall, equates to fewer fees.
“Telegraph has made it easy to monitor where our cars are dwelling,” says Amanda. “Because of this we are able to ensure equipment stays in motion and decrease our overall cycle times, which results in fewer demurrage fees.”
A Partnership Built on Responsiveness
Technology advancements aside, what Pete Lien & Sons team describes most often is the relationship they have built with the Telegraph team. Telegraph’s Operations team acts as an extension of the Pete Lien & Sons team, maintaining regular communication, and quickly resolving any questions that arise.
“Our working relationship with Telegraph has been one of the best parts of this whole experience. They have taken the time to really understand our business and make shipping by rail easier throughout the whole process. Ultimately, this makes shippers feel more confident in choosing rail,” Teresa says.
For Pete Lien & Sons, that consistency has been as valuable as the technology itself.
The Bigger Picture
“We’re a fourth-generation family company, and we take the long view on everything we do. Modernizing our rail operations with Telegraph isn’t about chasing shiny, new technology – it’s about making sure our team has the tools they need to do their jobs well and serve our customers better. That’s always been our goal,” notes Jeb Rieb, Logistics Supervisor.
Pete Lien & Sons has been moving the materials that build communities for more than 80 years, and rail is how they are able to get those materials where they need them to be. The Telegraph platform makes it so that they can predictably manage their rail workflows – with less manual effort and more real-time clarity.
When the information is available because you have access to the right tools, the people running rail operations can truly focus on what they do best: serving their customers, managing overall growth, and keeping things moving – on time and reliably.