Digital BW, The Print

I have some 6cm x 6cm b&w negatives exposed back in the early '60s on 
Tri X Pan Professional. They blew up to 20" x 16" quite successfully 
using a DeVere cold-cathode enlarger. 

Recently I had some of these negatives scanned by a bureau through an 
Imacon Flextight machine, but grain has become so pronounced that the 
scans are virtually unusable.

I understand the problem. Light in a scanner is highly collimated - 
the light beams are nearly perfectly parallel. So the grains don't 
just block the light - they scatter it creating greater apparent 
density. The so-called "Callier Effect." And it will have been made 
worse because I neglected to tell the bureau *not* to sharpen the 
image!

However I wondered what 'work-round' others in this group have tried 
to reduce grain on silver negatives. 

I have tried blurring  the image lightly in Photoshop, followed by 
unsharp masking but am not very happy with the results.

I have also read somewhere that some old-timers digitise their images 
via a conventional photographic print and a flat-bed scanner. By 
printing with a diffuse light source and a relatively soft grade of 
paper they suppress grain while capturing a tonal range that can be 
enhanced in Photoshop. Doubtless this works, but it does seem 'the 
long way round' and since it introduces an extra step in the process, 
image quality is bound to suffer.

Of course I'm now running trials with the newer chromogenic films but 
that doesn't solve my problems with the archival images I still have.

Any ideas on this theme would be most welcome!