Even the MBTA can’t stop Phil Eng

A wave of applause began to rise.

Healey smiled and tried to continue. “And Phil –”

The clapping cut her off again, growing still louder. More cheers erupted. People took to their feet, hundreds of them.

Phil Eng, seated in the front row, was surprised. Wearing a dark suit and red tie, his hair freshly cropped close to his head, he stood and gave a small wave. The 63-year-old is uncomfortable with effusive praise, maybe even skeptical given what he knows about shifting political winds. But there they were: state lawmakers and small-town officials, CEOs and labor leaders, clergy members and nonprofit directors, all standing and applauding him. Healey flashed him a thumbs-up.

“Yes,” the governor said when people finally began to retake their seats. “In Phil we trust!”

“In Phil we trust” seems to be the dominant mood in Boston these days, as unbelievable as that is to anyone familiar with the record of the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority. After ages of deferred maintenance, disinvestment, and declining service — plus a string of disasters large and small — the MBTA had long felt entirely unfixable. But then Eng became general manager two years ago, and suddenly some rare positive news followed. Union contracts got settled. Fractured tracks got fixed. Slow zones disappeared for the first time in two decades.

Along the way, Eng has been winning over not only public officials, but the T’s least-forgiving critics: riders. To be sure, there’s still plenty to complain about in a city where comparing stories about the T’s problems feels like a civic pastime. And yet now riders are chasing Eng down train cars for selfies, creating memes of him with laser-beam eyes, and nicknaming him “Train Daddy Eng.” One woman has called the longtime civil servant her “celebrity crush.”

For his part, Eng, a civil engineer by training, loves hearing from happy T customers, though he has a tendency to meet a compliment by probing for intel on what else needs improving. He also found the standing ovation deeply affecting. But when I asked him about it later, he struggled to put his feelings into words. “I guess you could say I was humbled,” he said after some thought. It was as if he didn’t want to seem attached to a kind of public affection that might disappear any day. He prefers to stay focused on the work to come.

Even when Eng is standing still, his mind is racing ahead. It has to be. The MBTA, the nation’s oldest subway system, is sprawling, complex, and all-too-often crumbling. Sometimes, trains slip off the rails, or ceiling tiles crash onto platforms; sometimes it’s far worse. Before Eng started, two Green Line trolleys collided, injuring at least two dozen people, for example, and a man was dragged to his death after a Red Line door closed on his arm and a safety device failed. Eng is responsible for not only getting some 800,000 passengers each weekday to their destinations, but also getting them there safely.

Governor Healey knew selecting a new MBTA general manager was a risky endeavor. It would be, as she put it to me recently, “one of the most important hires I would make.”

But Eng was also taking a big personal and professional gamble in taking the job. Raised by Chinese immigrant parents who worked endless hours running a storefront laundry on Long Island, he climbed to some of the highest state transportation posts in New York, through a rare combination of technical prowess and people skills. But by the time a Massachusetts headhunter called, he was in a different phase of life, past 60 and working a lucrative consulting job with better hours than in the public sector. He and his wife, their four children grown, were talking about finally doing some more traveling.

Accepting the MBTA job would mean taking a significant pay cut and moving to Massachusetts from Long Island — he’d never lived outside of New York — all in exchange for a 24/7, high-stakes job where every phone call could bring news of a catastrophe. Over the past two decades, turnover in the top MBTA post has taken place once every two years, on average. It’s rare for a T general manager to make it to four.

There were many reasons for Eng to say no. He didn’t need the job, and some surely wondered why he, or anyone really, would even want it. But Phil Eng is built differently than many people.

He couldn’t wait to get started.

Eng is a perpetual motion machine. The first thing he does when his alarm goes off in the morning is check his phone, scanning the MBTA’s alerts for anything that might need his attention. He knows it won’t be something huge — his team will call at any hour if something goes south. By 7 a.m., he’s out the door of the East Boston rental apartment he shares with his wife, Carole, and speed-walking to the nearby Maverick station.

By Boston standards, Eng has a pretty good commute: Blue Line to Green, 20 minutes or so door to door. He spends that time checking emails, speaking with T employees and riders, and scanning T stations and subway cars for problems. If he spots something — a burned-out light, a spilled cup of Dunkin’ — he places a call to his staff to make sure it’s flagged and fixed. Eng encourages his employees to do the same. “What better eyes and ears than our own?” he says.

Eng’s office is on the third floor of the State Transportation Building at 10 Park Plaza, about a block from Boston Common, where North America’s first underground subway opened in 1897. It’s an unshowy, utilitarian office space, with a coffee maker he uses to make his first cup of the day. Photos of his family line the shelves, and there’s sports paraphernalia all over the walls, including from his favorite team, the New York Mets (which he admits is a bold confession in Red Sox country).

He thrives on identifying and fixing problems, even political ones. His days often stretch past 7 p.m., those hours spent in meetings or in the field working over knotty problems, like the recent rocky opening of the South Coast Rail bringing service to New Bedford and Fall River. Any given day could involve advising on a signal failure, nudging contract negotiations forward, and planning how to convey an urgent funding need to state officials. When Eng can find a few minutes between meetings, he often gobbles down a salad with chicken he brings from home. Sometimes he’ll make himself an espresso as a treat.

The MBTA is an enormous thing for anyone to keep in their head. Nearly 800 miles of subway and commuter rail tracks. More than 170 bus routes that cover 331,000 miles per week. A $3 billion annual operating budget to manage and some 8,000 employees to oversee. But he keeps it in his head: If the T map is like a multicolored web stretching across Greater Boston, Eng’s talent is to stand at the center, alert to even the most minor vibration.

One evening in late March, I met Eng at his downtown office, so we could ride the subway back to his home in East Boston. He walked briskly toward the Boylston Street Green Line station, as if he had to stay one step ahead or get crushed by the relentless list of demands on his time.

As we approached the entrance, I waved my well-worn plastic Charlie Card, hoping to impress him that I’m a regular T rider.

“You won’t need it,” he said, explaining that the station’s fare gates weren’t working.

I was so surprised, I almost stopped walking. Among the steady stream of MBTA alerts pinging Eng’s phone that day, he had somehow noticed one that said the electricity was out at these specific fare gates.

He also didn’t seem the least bit defensive that one of the first things I was witnessing that day was a problem. Repair workers were already on it, he assured me.

As he’s learned in his life, it’s no use stewing over things. The best you can do is work the problem, then tackle the next one.

When Eng was growing up, his parents operated a laundry in Williston Park, a middle-class town on Long Island. The family lived in the back of the business, Hand Laundry, until Eng was about 6 and they’d saved enough to buy a 1,250-square-foot home around the corner. Eng and his siblings, an older sister, Rose, and younger brother, Roger, saw their parents put in long hours. “They were working 24/7 before I heard that phrase really become so popular,” Eng says with his unmistakable New York accent.

His stories so frequently circle back to his family that, earlier this year, I boarded a train at South Station to make the journey to his hometown. I met his 93-year-old mother, Maureen, at the family home, where she has continued to live since her husband, Frank, died at age 94 a decade ago. Eng’s siblings live nearby.

Wearing a sweater and a cross necklace, Maureen is mentally sharp and moves well with the help of a walker. She talks about those early years with a small smile and a matter-of-factness, as if grueling hours in a sweltering laundry was just an ordinary start for newcomers to America. For many Chinese immigrants as far back as in the mid-19th century, it was.

“In the beginning, when I came over here, it was only 18 cents a shirt,” she says, sitting in her living room, her white hair pulled back. “Eighteen cents — that’s it. That time was very tough.”

Still, she and her husband figured out a way to treat every customer as special, a lesson Eng has taken to heart in his own work. “Their commitment was roof, food, take care of the family, but also to the customers that they had,” he says. “Everyone had different things about their shirts: ‘I want more starch.’ ‘I want less starch.’” His parents made sure customers left satisfied.

They were one of few Asian families living in the area then. Eng’s parents knew customers would have trouble pronouncing their Chinese names, so they took on American ones — Mo-Ching became Maureen and Ging-Ngep became Frank. They spoke Cantonese at home, but their kids mainly replied in English, which their parents didn’t mind. They wanted the children to do well in America. “They wanted us to fit in,” Eng says.

They also changed the spelling of their family name from “Ng” to “Eng,” in part because customers found the original hard to pronounce, and in part because neighborhood kids mocked the name, his mother recalls, saying “Ng” stood for “No Good.” There was a limit to fitting in, however: If Eng’s father overheard ethnic insults to his children, he would always speak up to stop it.

Maureen says her husband had an elementary school education — she only had a bit more — but prioritized learning. She recalled Phil was on the quiet side. Before he started kindergarten, he’d never stray far from his father, whether he was speaking to customers or toiling over an ironing board. “He would never, never go away,” she says. “His father didn’t know what to do with him, so he gives him a little bit of math. ‘If I give you 20 cents and then you go to the candy store and buy something, how much do you have left?’”

All the kids were eager students, Phil so much he’d get upset when school was canceled for a snow day. But by high school, his parents’ entrepreneurial streak had kicked in and he saw a way to earn some extra money, Maureen recalls. “I tell you. It snows? That’s good. Phil takes the snow shovel asking the people if they need him to shovel the snow. He takes care of people’s yards,” she says. “Later, he delivers papers — Newsday. He got to be a master carrier.”

Through high school, Eng stood out more in math and science than in other subjects, so a guidance counselor recommended he apply to engineering programs for college. When he was accepted to The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in 1979, there was no doubt he’d go — it was good for civil engineering, but also tuition would be free, as it was for all students then. He lived at home, commuting 90 minutes to Manhattan via subway and bus.

After a year at Cooper Union, Eng had developed some doubts about civil engineering. He could do the work, but didn’t love all the calculus and physics. Civil engineers speak in the language of tensile strength and megapascals, a world that felt confining to him. He considered transferring to architecture, but that would require him to apply to that program and could jeopardize his scholarship. He stuck with civil engineering.

When Eng got a job in 1983 in the New York State Transportation Department in Manhattan as a junior engineer, making $17,000 a year, he still wondered if the career path ahead would be right for him.

Every big highway and bridge project has a way of hitting snags — a faulty measurement that costs money, say, or a late delivery that throws everything that follows off schedule. Throughout his 20s and 30s, Eng developed a reputation as an engineer with a nimble mind, the kind you went to when just such an issue emerged. He had a knack for quickly gathering input from others, diagnosing the problem, and designing a plan of action.

A series of small promotions and incremental raises followed, which was welcome financial news for Eng, his wife, and their growing family. In 1991, he’d married Carole Scott, a woman from Wales who had been working as an au pair on Long Island when they were introduced through a mutual friend. Over the next decade, they had two sons and twin daughters.

At work, doubts about his civil engineering track still pecked at Eng. One day in 2001 he was invited to take part in an executive leadership retreat, which included a Myers-Briggs personality test. After tallying the results, organizers divided the employees into two groups. On one side were the introverts — almost all the engineers ended up there. On the other side were the extroverts from design, communications, and human resources. When it was Eng’s turn, he was surprisingly sent to stand with the extroverted creative types.

“You’re on the wrong side!” a fellow engineer cracked.

The results were a revelation to Eng as well. They put words to a sense that he was happiest when he could bring his full personality to work, emotions and all. (“My wife will joke that I could cry at any kind of movie really quickly,” Eng says.) As messy as working with teams could be, he loved it.

His interest in leading teams on ambitious projects got noticed, including by the higher-ups in the New York Department of Transportation. In 2012, when he was in his early 50s, he was promoted to chief engineer, overseeing about 2,500 employees. The $152,000-a-year position meant leading high-profile bridge and highway projects that developed under the watchful eye of Governor Andrew Cuomo.

The new job meant working out of the Albany headquarters, about a three-hour drive from his Long Island home. He and Carole decided it made no sense for the whole family to move — the children were settled in good public schools — though that meant she’d essentially be a single mother during the week.

For about four years, Eng came home only on weekends, when he tried to pack in as much family time as possible. In Albany, he considered renting an apartment, but when he did the math, he saw he’d save money by staying in a hotel. Each week, though, he’d go online to compare hotel prices and move to the cheapest one. “I’d stay in hotels that I’d never ask Carole to stay in,” he says.

Cuomo leaned heavily on Eng to undertake big projects in abbreviated time frames, such as the nearly $900 million rebuilding of the Kosciuszko Bridge, which connects Brooklyn and Queens, and the construction of “Welcome Center” rest stops along New York state’s major highways. He delivered results and thrived being at the center of things.

As a leader, Eng stayed engaged in the details, but also delegated power to his managers, who were expected to work collaboratively. Eng pushed them hard, but in his own way.

“I never heard a time when he raised voices with anybody,” recalls Sam Zhou, a former assistant commissioner for operations in New York’s Transportation Department, whom Eng persuaded to join the MBTA staff. “If there is an issue, he will pick up the phone and call or walk to your office and say, ‘Let’s talk through this.’ He doesn’t do memos back and forth.”

Eng believes his collaborative style leads to better results. “I’ve seen many leaders and managers that are just very directive and not caring, and they could be effective to a certain point, right?” he says. “But I also think if you get people to want to do something, you actually get more than if you say: ‘I told you to do it, so just do it.’”

While in Albany, Eng gained another insight that informs his work: When it comes to their daily commute, the public can handle a degree of glitches and delays — but they want higher-ups to give the bad news to them straight, then explain what’s being done to fix the problem.

In 2017, Cuomo supported Eng’s shift to executive roles at the New York City region’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the nation’s largest mass-transit system, allowing him to live at home on Long Island and commute to Manhattan. The next year, he was promoted to lead one of the MTA’s subsidiaries, the Long Island Rail Road, the nation’s largest commuter rail system.

The LIRR, handling some 250,000 riders a day, was fraught with major service delays, and its previous leader dogged by complaints about poor communication, recalls Gerard Bringmann, chair of LIRR’s commuter council representing riders. By contrast, “Phil was a breath of fresh air,” Bringmann says. Eng threw himself into a major capital program to improve rail lines and switches, which he was confident would speed up travel times. He also made sure to be visible to riders, even during the challenging years of the pandemic. “There was Phil, the president of the LIRR, walking through the train and handing out masks,” Bringmann recalls.

Eng’s four-year tenure had its low moments, including wrangling with unions about overtime, and alleged abuses of it, as Eng pushed big projects. At one point, a photo of him grimacing appeared in Newsday — the paper he once delivered as a kid — with the headline “MTA, LIRR union relationship worse than ever.”

Dennis Varley, former chief engineer of the LIRR, remembers Eng slowly winning over many employees with his hard work and careful decision-making. “He’s a quick study,” Varley says. Eng’s track-improvement changes eventually led to some of the best on-time performances posted by the LIRR.

But around 2021, an administrative overhaul to centralize operations within the Metropolitan Transportation Authority took away some of the autonomy from the LIRR’s top post. It was not a welcome change for Eng. He was just past his 60th birthday, and it seemed time to do what many colleagues had long advised him to do. Go to the private sector, people said. Cash in on your expertise and enjoy the saner hours. Eng took a position with a construction consulting firm, based on Long Island.

A part of Carole had thought, even hoped, her husband was ready to enjoy more leisure time. But she also knew, through three decades of marriage, that he can get restless and is at his best in the middle of the action.

Eng wasn’t on the job long before he felt something was missing. He wasn’t that excited about the pursuit of high-playing clients, including wining and dining at nice restaurants. He missed the energy — and sense of purpose — in the public sector. Speaking of that time, Eng chooses his words carefully, as he often does when he feels he risks disparaging someone or an organization. He wants me to know he was grateful for the opportunity. It wasn’t them; it was him.

“I didn’t really feel that I was fulfilled in everything I was doing,” he says, “and I wasn’t.”

When I speak to Carole, she puts it more directly: He was “miserable.”

But when an executive headhunter for Massachusetts came calling in early 2023, the couple still had some thinking to do. Though the GM position would be high paying — a five-year contract with a base salary of $470,000, plus incentive bonuses — it would still mean a pay cut from his private-sector job and moving to Massachusetts.

Soon, however, the answer was clear. “He gets a rush from being a problem solver,” Carole says.

Eng started in April 2023, and threw himself into the MBTA job like someone rescued from a career detour. He didn’t mind the new job’s long hours — his phone was ringing again with people who needed him. He’d done his homework about the T’s problems, but some things were even worse than he’d expected.

Shortly into his tenure, he inherited one of his first major crises. Large portions of the tracks for the new, $2.3 billion Green Line extension in Somerville and Medford, decades in the making, were inexplicably built at too narrow of a gauge for the trains that rode atop them. Eng didn’t learn the extent of the problem until months into the job, but then discovered some MBTA staff had first learned about it in April 2021 and still decided to plow ahead.

After an intense probe, Eng released his findings in an October 2023 press conference, acknowledging the errors made, earlier lack of disclosure, and that the contractors responsible for the errors — not taxpayers — would be responsible for the fixes.

“All I know is that I believe the team could have been more proactive and should have been more proactive,” Eng said.

At least two officials subsequently left, but the T wouldn’t say if they were fired, or even name who they were. And Eng still demurs from pointing fingers.

In his view, this was part of a larger cultural problem at the MBTA that was broken and in need of repair: People were afraid to speak up about mistakes. They stayed in their own silos. Those on long-term capital improvement projects, for instance, often didn’t talk enough to day-to-day operations, and vice versa. This led to extensive delays on projects, including building the new Lynn commuter rail station. (These communication issues were also identified as a major problem in a scathing federal safety report prior to his arrival.)

Too often, Eng says, the T culture wasn’t built to consider novel solutions. For instance, not all capital improvement fixes require a total shutdown of day-to-day service, he says. Sometimes you have to “change the tire while riding the bicycle.”

To change the culture, he also made some staffing changes. He persuaded several trusted colleagues from his previous jobs, including Zhou and Varley, to relocate to Massachusetts to help germinate the kind of MBTA work culture he wanted, as well as promoted a highly popular internal MBTA candidate, Ryan Coholan, to the important position of chief operating officer. In the meantime, he’s directed the hiring of some 1,500 new employees.

Given the T’s grim situation before Eng’s arrival, perhaps he could only look good by comparison. Longtime MBTA workers say a culture shift is indeed happening — and staff morale and levels of cross-department communication are higher than they’ve been in a long time. “By far, he’s the best general manager we’ve ever had,” says James Evers, president of the Boston Carmen’s Union, Local 589, which represents the vast majority of the T’s 8,000 employees, and has himself been working at the agency for more than 20 years.

At the end of 2023, Eng and the agency embarked on their most ambitious project yet, the Track Improvement Program, known internally as TIP. Its bland name, and even blander acronym, belied the massive challenges ahead: To bring every inch of subway track into a state of “good repair” within a year’s time to eliminate the system’s slow zones, about 200 of them. It required a step-by-step shutdown of the entire MBTA system, redirecting riders to shuttle buses sometimes for weeks at a time. It was like pulling off four decades of Band-Aids, then ordering a yearlong surgery.

Thomas McGee, chair of the MBTA board of directors, recalls some anxiety about the plan. If successful, trains would travel faster and more safely on upgraded rail lines, rather than crawl through slow zones — some as slow as 3 miles per hour — that had been federally mandated to avoid derailments. But what if it didn’t work and angry riders revolted? Eng persuaded the board to take a chance.

Now all he had to do was deliver. Normally unflappable, he had some restless nights ahead of the project kickoff in November 2023. “That was a scary weekend,” he recalls. But they’d prepared the best they could, inundating the public with announcements about the alternative bus schedules and timetables.

Riders endured frustrations, yet by the end of last year, as scheduled, all major track work was complete. By the end, they’d replaced 250,000 feet of rail and all slow zones had disappeared. Officials calculated that the improvements saved riders 2.4 million minutes every weekday, according to an MBTA press release.

Dan Grabauskas, now a transportation consultant in New York, served as MBTA general manager from 2005 to 2009. He’s been impressed that Eng “asked people to bite the bullet,” and says the risk paid off. “What is his secret sauce?” Grabauskas asks. “Visibility, availability, and transparency.”

Rather than passengers leading a revolt, they’ve elevated him to some kind of folk hero. When I rode with him for a second time, in mid-May, I saw at least six riders approach him, one by one.

“Excuse me, I thought I recognized you,” said one man, walking over to Eng on a Red Line platform. “I just want to thank you for the Red Line working so well.” Eng thanked him, then pivoted to asking for more feedback.

Pradeepta Panigrahi, an engineer at Gillette, asked if he could get a selfie. He posted it on Instagram later that day, writing, “It’s not hard to guess the reasons behind the recent improvements on the T — when you have strong and down to earth leadership working with intent from the grassroots level up, & not just content with a title.”

More than two years into his five-year contract as GM, Eng and Carole still rent in an East Boston high-rise, which has sweeping views of Boston Harbor.

They still own their Long Island home, and Carole returns there with some frequency to visit family and friends. He goes back too, mostly to visit his mother, often helping her fix broken things around the house.

I wondered if they decided to rent to hedge their bets in Boston, because they weren’t sure how long he’d last in a job that can be politically precarious. Eng tells me they’re now looking to buy a place.

There are other signs they’re getting settled, too. One of their twin daughters, now in her mid-20s, lives in Boston and works as a biomedical engineer. Eng is delighted that they meet for dinner about once a week, the kind of family time he regrets missing when his kids were younger. In his downtown office, posters of the Celtics and Patriots have made their way to the walls, though his Mets collection isn’t going anywhere.

Eng has had other reasons recently to be pleased. Funding is key to his ability to improve the system, and the MBTA, a quasi-public agency, has proposed a $3.24 billion budget for the next fiscal year, the largest operating budget in the history of the T and one that relies heavily on sales tax and passenger fare revenue. Debate remains in the Legislature, however, over how much they are willing to cover of the T’s projected budget shortfalls.

Though Eng knows the future can be uncertain for a man in his position, he’s enjoying it while he can. When he and his wife board the T for a Sox game or concert, he makes a point to say hello to subway drivers and platform workers. Quite often, the worker hands Carole a phone. The inevitable question is: “Can you take our picture?”

When asked how well Eng is adjusting to life in Boston, Carole doesn’t hesitate. “He is loving it here.”

They’re not sure exactly where they’ll land in their search for buying a place in the city. They’ve both had such a long stretch in the suburbs of Long Island that they’re looking for a change — having restaurants, museums, and sports venues nearby would be nice.

And, of course, good T access is non-negotiable. Eng has work to do.

Additional reporting by editorial assistant Adelaide Parker.

Patricia Wen can be reached at patricia.wen@globe.com. Follow her @GlobePatty.