MBTA fixed decades of maintenance issues in just over a year

MBTA General Manager Phillip Eng still gets goose bumps when he watches the hype video the agency produced last year to celebrate its completion of decades’ worth of repairs in just over a year, he said this week.

In November 2023, about eight months after Gov. Maura Healey appointed Eng to take over the beleaguered T, the new general manager made a promise to clear a yearslong backlog of maintenance work by the end of 2024.

The undertaking would mean addressing over 220 “slow zones” because a lack of track maintenance made full speed impossible. The subway system hadn’t been slow-zone-free in more than two decades , as far back as the MBTA’s records on the subject went, the agency said in December when the repairs were completed.

Speaking Monday at a national public transit confe