Canadian National Railway Co. says it plans to try to recapture business it once handled that is now being served by the trucking industry.

Growth for the company lies in shipping forest products, coal, grain, sulphur and steel, says Paul Miller, CN's vice-president of transportation services.

"There's a lot of traffic that is moving by truck now that our colleagues in the trucking industry are challenged to handle," Miller told a Northern Alberta Transportation Club (NATC) audience in Edmonton last week at the Royal Glenora Club.

"We would like to have an opportunity to bring that back to rail and I'm not just speaking for CN, I'm speaking for the North American industry."

Miller said the Montreal-based company, which has its western Canadian offices in Edmonton, cannot afford to be derailed at a time when growth opportunities are strong.

He added it needs to avoid the type of mistakes that have plagued business stalwarts such as General Motors and Nortel.

"They (both Nortel and GM) have seen their whole business models go south," he observed.

While Miller said he expects those two industry giants to make a comeback, a priority at CN is to capitalize on the openings that it feels are currently within reach.

"Our physical track structure is not constrained," said Miller, who has more than 25 years of CN operations and marketing experience. "We can add a lot more trains. We can add longer trains on to our system just by doing very targeted investments."

Part of the increasing demand for CN services is being driven by countries such as China and Japan, destinations for CN-transported coke and sulphur.

CN operates 19,300 route-miles of track in Canada and the United States and earned $6.5 billion Cdn in revenue in 2004.

Miller noted that "people power" will help the company drive its future success - as recent settlements with its unions seem to indicate.

The company has reached a tentative agreement with the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, which represents its signal and communications employees. The four-year deal, inked on March 25, helped avert a planned strike over wages and benefits and standby provisions.

The engineers and signal employees install, maintain and repair CN's signals and communications systems. They ensure the operation of level-crossing barriers and allow the company to monitor all train locations.

CN has also announced an agreement with the Teamsters Canada Rail Conference, which represents 1,750 locomotive engineers, to delay any labour action until May 12. The company signed a four-year contract in February with about 2,200 track maintenance workers, and also reached a tentative contract settlement with about 2,600 conductors, yard service employees and traffic co-ordinators.

"Our people power increases when we recruit the right people, develop them with the right skills and motivate them to do the right thing," said Miller.

CN believes a continued focus on its employees, customers and shareholders will allow it to evade the circumstances that have helped to topple a number of large corporations from their pedestals, he added.

"We're trying to avoid it by working on the key principles that I mentioned in my presentation: Service, cost management, safety, asset utilization and people," Miller said after his speech. "Driving improvements in all of those areas and focusing on people development are how we are trying to stay out of the soup, if you will, of complacency that perhaps has affected some other companies."

CN also believes that Edmonton plays an important role for the company.

"Edmonton is very much a centre for CN, where we establish our strategic direction and maintain control of our rail operations, not just in Alberta and Western Canada but across North America," CN spokesman Jim Feeny said in an interview.

With more than 19,000 employees across North America, CN has a staff of about 1,924 in Alberta. Of those, 1,443 are located in Edmonton.

CN runs the largest rail network in Canada and the only transcontinental network in North America.

The company operates in eight Canadian provinces and 16 U.S. states.

The NATC, which hosted the lunch event to inform its members about topical issues that affect their day-to-day business, is a professional association formed in 1968 to promote co-operation between users and suppliers of transportation. It has about 120 members.

- with files from The Canadian Press (Laura Severs can be reached at laura@businessedge.ca)