Latest news with #Eng
New Indian Express
a day ago
- Sport
- New Indian Express
Bumrah should be managed judiciously in Eng series, says McGrath
Glenn McGrath feels that Jasprit Bumrah's longevity depends on his bowling colleagues Express | File picture Cricket Bumrah should be managed judiciously in Eng series, says McGrath Australian pace legend Glenn McGrath shares his takes on the IPL final, Shubman Gill's prospects as red-ball skipper and India's leading pacer Jasprit Bumrah's workload Ashok Venugopal CHENNAI: AN 'exciting' IPL final between the Royal Challengers Bengaluru and Punjab Kings, India's new red-ball era with Shubman Gill and Jasprit Bumrah's workload for the upcoming test series are few of the things Glenn Mcgrath shared his views on, in an exclusive chat with The New Indian Express. McGrath, who is the Director of Coaching at the MRF Pace Foundation is in the city to coach players along with head coach M Senthilnathan. Analysing the IPL final between RCB and PBKS, McGrath stressed on the importance of having a good bowling attack to win titles in the T20 format. 'I think that's something commendable and well, that's how you win games isn't it' he began. 'You need bowlers as well, more so in Test matches if you're a good bowling side and a good unit in the shortest format of the game it makes a massive difference,'' adds McGrath. He lauded the performances of Punjab Kings skipper Shreyas Iyer in the IPL this season. 'Shreyas has been leading by example. Plus he has got Ricky Ponting as a coach. When a senior player performs like he did on Sunday (87 off 41b vs Mumbai Indians in Qualifier 2), it naturally helps younger players coming through. So a young team performs well when its captain gives them the confidence to go out and play,' McGrath went on to add. For someone who has won multiple titles for Australia, McGrath believed that whoever maintain high levels of energy at the final will emerge victorious. 'In Punjab's last game they chased down 203 and I think that will give them the confidence and momentum going in. I know RCB have played well and they've probably had a little bit more of a rest. It depends on the day how you perform not just the power play, but the whole duration of the match.' McGrath believed that India's five-match Test series against England starting on June 20 would be tough as they are short on experience with the retirements of Virat Kohli and Rohit Sharma. From his observations of new red-ball captain Shubman Gill, McGrath feels that he has traits of a good leader. Also read: Pujara reminisces good times with Kohli "I am keen to see how the team will be led by Gill. I think that he will do a good job as captain. I like the way he goes about it, he is pretty composed,' he added. He also commented on Gill's batting records outside India. 'That is the next challenge; he will want to go over there and set the standard in England. Batting there is a lot different to batting in India. It will be a challenge for him, but I think that he has got good composure,' the 55-year-old went on to add. McGrath believes that pacer Jasprit Bumrah looks good while bowling at the moment and insists that his workload be shared by other Indian bowlers. "Bumrah has not played the long version of the game (for several months now), so India have to use the other bowlers well. In Australia, he was the standout bowler, compared to the others. The key to Bumrah's longevity is how the bowlers around him bowl. If they (other bowlers) bowl longer spells, Bumrah can get a bit more of a rest," he opined. "In Australia, they over relied on him (Bumrah). He had to bowl more than he wanted. In the end, that is where the injury probably came from. He enjoys that extra responsibility. When he captained India in Perth, he stepped up and enjoyed the challenge. He will enjoy bowling with the Duke ball in English conditions," he signed off.
The Citizen
4 days ago
- General
- The Citizen
Reviving Paradise: May you never…
'May you never lay your head down without a hand to hold, may you never make your bed out in the cold', the beautiful words of John Martyn remind us that the seasons are changing and we all have challenges. May always arrives with a huge golden burst of the magnificent Mexican sunflowers, which although they look wonderful and we can appreciate their beauty, don't belong here as the name indicates. Because they are fast-growing and aggressive, and compete against our equally gorgeous indigenous plants, they really need elimination. Classified Category 1B: May not be owned, grown, moved, sold, given as a gift or dumped into waterways. Must be controlled and eliminated wherever possible. Clearly local authorities and those responsible for this duty are not managing nor winning the battle. The scale of the infestation is ever-increasing and requires calm strategic management of available resources to remove (destroy on site?) and replace with the beautiful indigenous options like Tall March Senecio (Eng)/Inkanga (Zulu) which look similar, but don't take over. This plant features as our May indigenous gem in the The Green Net 2025 biodiversity calendar as a fine example of how we can substitute invaders with indigenous, and the reasoning behind the excellent information we share on each page. The last stock of calendars is on the shelves and we call on all concerned gardeners to grab a copy for only R50 from our various distributors. Although we might be halfway through the year, the information never goes stale and many people are filing the pages for future garden plans and planting seasons. TGN will be in Shelly Beach at the Lutheran Plant and Garden Fair this Saturday with the last lot, or ask at: Pennington Conservancy, Pumula Superette, Folly Fields (Umzumbe), Locals and South Coast Garden Centre (Southport), Pickled Chicken's Coop (Tweni), The Good Health Shop (St Mike's), Froggy Pond (Uvongo), The Bloom Pot (Ramsgate), Southbroom Conservancy, Irie Market (Marina Beach), Secret Sithela and Munster Motor Museum, The Farm Stall (Port Edward), or Leopard Rock (Oribi). We all need to take responsibility for what we grow in our gardens, what is on the pavements and in the parks, wherever we can help – this is a way for you to actively contribute to supporting local – people and plants. 'Oh please won't you, and please won't you bear it in mind, Love is a lesson to learn in our time…' HAVE YOUR SAY Like the South Coast Herald's Facebook page, follow us on Twitter and Instagram At Caxton, we employ humans to generate daily fresh news, not AI intervention. Happy reading!
Spectator
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- Spectator
‘Sitting the 11-plus was the most momentous event of my life'
Geoff Dyer, eh? Geoff Bloody Dyer – without doubt one of contemporary Eng. Lit.'s most successful, intellectually playful and stylistically distinctive voices. His extraordinary oeuvre spans fiction, non-fiction, memoir, criticism and genre-defying hybrids, often likened – I don't know by who, but by me at least now – to greats such as W.G. Sebald or Roland Barthes. Dyer expertly navigates the tricky territory between high culture and everyday experience, balancing erudition with comic digression in books ranging from Out of Sheer Rage (a hilarious study of not writing a book about D.H. Lawrence) to But Beautiful (a genre-blending and largely non-irritating meditation on jazz) to Zona (a mercifully unpretentious personal exegesis of Stalker, the Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky's masterpiece). He skilfully dismantles conventional boundaries between the subject and the self, between artist and critic, forever restlessly inquiring into the nature of literary form and identity… Basically, Geoff Dyer went and did it. He got there first: modest, funny, clever, inventive. He is the deracinated writer's deracinated writer. And now he's done it again with Homework, which is a memoir about growing up in post-war England and is exactly the kind of memoir just about anyone who grew up in post-war England might want to write. Born in 1958 and brought up in Cheltenham, Dyer's was an archetypal mid-to-late-20th-century English childhood. Two up, two down? Check. Outside toilet? Check. Mum a dinner lady? Check. Dad a manual worker? Check. Odd and interesting aunts and uncles? Check. Fond memories of playing war with your friends on the estate? Check. And Airfix models, comics, bubblegum cards, conkers, the little drinks cabinet with drinks that no one drank, Robinson Crusoe on the telly, the corner shops, the tinkers and blade sharpeners who used to come to the door, verrucas, the buzzer in the doctor's surgery, Action Man, heaped spoons of sugar in your tea and coffee? Check, check, check, check.
Spectator
6 days ago
- General
- Spectator
We're losing the ability to read
A recent American study, called 'They Don't Read Very Well', analyses the reading comprehension abilities of English literature students at two Midwestern universities. You may be surprised to discover that the title is not ironic. That they don't read very well is an understatement along the lines of Spike Milligan's 'I told you I was ill'. The study's subjects were given the first paragraph of Charles Dickens's Bleak House, and asked to read it out loud, parsing the sentences for meaning. A doddle, you'd think, for anyone reading Eng lit at a university. Well, you'd be wrong. Most participants were unable to elicit a scintilla of sense from Dickens's prose. It's as if, dumbfounded, they'd been confronted with Linear B. This study's findings feel existential. I can hear the rumblings of disaster, as if the foundations of western culture, eroded for decades, are teetering into collapse. It won't happen here, I hear you say. But across Britain, in our educational establishments, teachers gather in corners and murmur. A university colleague tells me that, in a seminar, a student described a Robert Frost poem as gibberish. 'A mouse could have read it,' he writes. 'A small, not especially confident, mouse.' Study after study points in the same grim direction. Children hardly read; their tech-blinded parents don't care; their teachers don't have the resources; and many think that making students read 'difficult' books is elitist. Here, then, is the Dickens passage in question. I'm assuming that Spectator readers will be familiar with it. Otherwise, duck and cover, kids. Your capabilities are about to be strained to the max: 'LONDON. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln's Inn Hall.
Boston Globe
7 days ago
- Politics
- Boston Globe
Even the MBTA can't stop Phil Eng
A wave of applause began to rise. Healey smiled and tried to continue. 'And Phil –' Advertisement 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. Advertisement 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 Phil Eng rides the Red Line in May. joanna fiona chattman/for the Boston Globe 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, Advertisement Governor Healey knew 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. Advertisement 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 Advertisement 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 Eng works beside a New York Mets poster in 2023, shortly after his arrival at the MBTA. Lane Turner/Globe Staff The MBTA is an enormous thing for anyone to keep in their head. 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. Advertisement 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. Eng being held by his father, alongside his mother and older sister Rose. From Phil Eng 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. Eng and his mother. From Phil Eng 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 — . 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 Eng family's laundry business in Williston Park on Long Island. From Phil Eng 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 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 '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. Eng inspecting the Brooklyn Bridge in 1992. From Phil Eng 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. Carole and Eng at their wedding in 1991. From Phil Eng Cuomo leaned heavily on Eng to undertake big projects in abbreviated time frames, such as the nearly $900 million 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 Eng, in a Boy Scout leader uniform, with son Christopher. From Phil Eng 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, 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. The first major crisis Phil Eng faced after starting his job at the MBTA was the discovery of a problem with the tracks for the Green Line extension in Somerville and Medford. Lane Turner/Globe Staff '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 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. Phil Eng poses for a portrait at the MBTA Training Facility in South Boston. joanna fiona chattman/for the Boston Globe 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 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. Eng chats with a driver at Wonderland station in Revere. Lane Turner/Globe Staff 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.' MBTA rider Pradeepta Panigrahi gets a selfie with Eng. joanna fiona chattman/for the Boston Globe 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 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
