For over 80 years, Pete Lien & Sons has been in the business of building things – 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
Industry-wide rail shippers face challenges when it comes to their rail freight visibility. Historically, it has 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 isn’t just inefficient, it constrains them from being able to proactively serve their customers and feeling confident in the information they are providing.
Complete Waybill Booking in One Platform
With Telegraph, waybills are automatically created and processed directly on one platform. 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.
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. 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
The Pete Lien & Sons team now receives scheduled reports, including ETA updates, 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 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 a Logistics Supervisor at Pete Lien & Sons. “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
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.
“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,” says a Logistics Coordinator at Pete Lien & Sons.
For Pete Lien & Sons, that consistency has been as valuable as the technology itself.