We’ve all hung around waiting for slow trains at one time or another, but this is ridiculous.

Though he’s bearing the suspense with admirable calm, Peter Armstrong, Vancouver-based president of the Great Canadian Railtours Co. (GCRTC), is twiddling his thumbs while the federal Competition Bureau stews over an issue with major implications for his company’s future.

At press time, the feds were still dithering over whether or not to approve CN’s $1-billion proposal to take over freight service from provincially owned B.C. Rail.

As part of that deal, CN has also agreed to farm out passenger traffic on B.C. Rail routes. Armstrong’s privately owned company made a bid for that job and he expected to hear, one way or another, months ago.

Peter Armstrong

But he’s accepted the fact there’ll be no announcement until the Competition Bureau decides to approve the sale to CN. Or not.

“The great news would be, we win the bid,” said Armstrong, a one-time Hotel Vancouver bellhop who spends a lot of time griping about unfair competition from publicly subsidized railways, i.e. VIA Rail.

“But even if we lose, there’s still good news: We’ll have another private operator out here. I’d love to see a private-sector solution.”

Armstrong readily admits the general blight that stalled international tourism following the terrorist attacks of September 2001 hit the Great Canadian Railtours Co. particularly hard.

“From 2001 to this year, it’s been dismal. In 2001, we lost the last six weeks of our (summer season),” he said. “Then we had SARS, the Iraq war . . . we’re finally seeing some growth this year, but it’s just about bringing us back to where we were in 2000.”

Despite a few years of rugged going, Armstrong remains bullish on the future and GCRTC is steaming forward with two expansion proposals, including the B.C. Rail passenger pitch.

This week, GCRTC launches another new tourist rail service known as the North Coast Explorer. It’s a three-hour shore excursion for 65,000 Alaskan cruise-ship passengers expected to dock this year at new port facilities in Prince Rupert.

“It’s too early for us to know what pro rata share of that volume we can (attract to the new tourist train),” Armstrong admitted.

“But the Prince Rupert Port Authority is predicting a 30-plus-per-cent increase in volume of visitors on the cruise ships next year. At that rate, we may start breaking even a lot faster than we think,” he enthused.

Armstrong entered the rolling tourist trade in a big way in 1990, when his company purchased the Rocky Mountaineer Railtours service (still wholly owned by GCRTC) from VIA Rail for a reported $8 million.

And even though the upmarket tourist train found itself butting heads against the independent Crown corporation’s traditional passenger service on the Jasper-to-Vancouver run, Armstrong’s spunky team made good progress throughout the 1990s.

After logging only so-so volumes (a reported 11,000-plus passengers)

during its first summer of operation, Rocky Mountaineer Railtours jacked up that number to a much more respectable 43,000-plus within six years.

Today Armstrong affirms the accuracy of a 1997 Financial Post story that reported an annual growth rate of 26 per cent for a company that industry insiders still consider a well-run outfit with a better-than-even chance to return to pre-9/11 prosperity.

Even so, Armstrong isn’t as forthcoming about current passenger volumes on the Vancouver-Banff and Vancouver-Jasper tourist runs as he was during the pre-9/11 salad days. “We like to keep (those numbers) confidential,” he says.

In spite of recent struggles, Armstrong remains high on the potential for growth in the tourist rail business, as long as that growth rewards the initiative of private operators.

“Our vision is, if you’re going to be in the tourism business, you should be able to do it without a subsidy,” he said, a not-so-subtle shot at VIA Rail.

His complaints against VIA extend back to the early ’90s, when a mediator agreed with GCRTC that the vendor had led the new operator to expect an unrealistically high volume of paying passengers when it bought the Rocky Mountaineer Railtours service.

Fifteen years later, VIA continues to cater to tourists, though its bread-and-butter remains short- to medium- distance passenger runs between big cities in Ontario and Quebec.

In any case, if GCRTC does succeed in its B.C. Rail bid, Armstrong would love to go head-to-head against VIA’s Prince Rupert-to-Jasper passenger run.

“We’re interested in opportunities around the globe,” he said.

Today VIA Rail.

Tomorrow, the world.