Henry Russell’s earliest memory from inside a tunnel was riding Boston’s subway on the lap of his grandfather, a motorman for the Metropolitan Transit Authority, predecessor of the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority. The elder Russell even let his 4-year-old grandson ring the trolley bell as they pulled into Park Street Station. “You could get away with those things back then, everything was family,” he says.
The little boy in the tunnel, now 80, built a five-plus decade career as an internationally recognized expert in waterproofing systems, fireproofing materials and grouting for underground structures. Serving as HNTB’s director of tunnel resilience and rehabilitation since last year, Russell has worked on projects across six continents—including on the Taipei Metro tunnels, Venezuelan wharfs and a West African liquefied natural gas plant. While his portfolio also includes some of the largest U.S. infrastructure projects, such as Boston’s Central Artery and Seattle’s Alaskaway, Russell has a soft spot for about 20 projects he completed for MBTA, as he remembers “wandering around [the facilities] with my grandfather.”