POLITICIANS AND BUREAUCRATS are usually circumspect when it comes to the future prospects of state contractors, especially when half a decade or more remains on an existing agreement.

That made it striking when then-Transportation Secretary Stephanie Pollack suggested in 2017 that Keolis, the French company in charge of running the MBTA’s sprawling commuter rail network, though not even halfway through an eight-year contract, was unlikely to earn an extension if the Baker administration had its way.

A few years later, though, the T changed course and kept Keolis in place. Then officials extended the contract again. And now, as the MBTA and the Healey administration prepare to weigh bids for the next lucrative, multiyear commuter rail operation contract, Keolis is still in the mix, tapped last month as one of three finalists in a joint bid with fellow French rail company Alstom.

It’s been a striking turnaround in reputation for a company whose first year in the role was marred by a disastrous winter and scrutiny over its management capabilities. And there may be a fairly straightforward explanation for it.

“Over time, they’ve become a much more competent operator,” said Pete Wilson, senior policy director at the advocacy group Transportation for Massachusetts. “Trains seem to be more on-time, the trains are clean when you ride them, you get a pretty good amount of communication from the engineers and conductors if something has gone awry.”

Former governor Deval Patrick’s administration picked Keolis in 2014 for an eight-year, roughly $2.7 billion contract. The deal, like others before it, outsources operations and management of the dozen commuter rail lines that collectively transport tens of millions of riders per year, though the T itself owns the trains and the tracks.

A good deal of the commuter rail’s dismal performance in the first year was, arguably, outside Keolis’s control. One storm after another slammed into the region in 2015, dumping a record 110 inches of snow that upended virtually every mode of travel.

It was also a different, pre-pandemic era. Most employees stranded by canceled trains and buses wound up missing work altogether, unable to pivot to a remote alternative.

“In 2015, there was no remote work. Most of us had never been on Zoom,” Pollack, who served as transportation secretary from 2015 to 2021, told CommonWealth Beacon. “If you didn’t get to work, you didn’t work. It wasn’t like you went home and turned on the computer.”

But some of Keolis’s issues lingered after the snow and ice melted. Insiders said Keolis in its first few years struggled with staffing, at times failing to have enough operators on the clock to run the full schedule of service laid out in the contract. Fare collection — before the installation of fare gates at North Station and South Station — was at times haphazard.

Plus, too many trains arrived late. The contract called for at least 92 percent of trips get to their final destination within five minutes of the scheduled time. Keolis missed that target by nearly 10 percentage points in its first, winter-obliterated year, and its on-time performance remained stuck below 90 percent from 2016 through 2019, according to MBTA data.

Beacon Hill did not hide its displeasure. Lawmakers warned of “management concerns” unrelated to the winter issues; in early 2017, Pollack publicly signaled that the Baker administration’s preferred approach would be to let the Keolis contract expire and go back to the market rather than trigger available extensions.

Brian Kane, executive director of the MBTA Advisory Board watchdog group, believes Pollack’s skepticism pushed Keolis bosses into action.

“Stephanie Pollack, I think quite frankly, scared Keolis headquarters. That caused them to send more folks and invest more money into this,” said Kane, who was part of the massive selection team that picked Keolis in 2014. “The last thing they wanted for their global reputation was to lose this deal, so I think in the short term, they staffed up.”

After that, officials recall, the relationship — and the T’s satisfaction with Keolis — improved. The French operator seemed to communicate more with MBTA bosses, and addressed some of the staffing shortages that had been causing headaches.

Both parties agreed in 2017 to share revenues from boosted fare collections. Before that, all of the money from paying riders went to the T; the deal allowed Keolis to earn a share for itself if fare revenue increased, incentivizing the operator to boost its fare collection efforts.

The outlook was on the upswing when an inflection point arrived that no one expected: the COVID-19 pandemic.

At the time, Keolis was nearly six years into the original eight-year contract. Because operating the commuter rail network is such an enormous undertaking, state officials expected to need 18 to 24 months of lead time to prepare for another round of bidding.

Consensus quickly grew that, with the world upside-down in the early months of the public health crisis, the safest approach was to keep Keolis around, despite the Baker administration’s prior skepticism.

“Would you have tested the market in June of 2020?” said Pollack, who is now a senior fellow at MIT’s Mobility Initiative. “We don’t know when lockdown is ending, we don’t know when people are going back to work.”

The MBTA’s oversight board voted unanimously in 2020 to extend Keolis for up to four years beyond its original contract expiration in 2022. The T awarded another one-year contract extension in 2024, keeping the French operator locked in through June 2027.

Since that early-pandemic decision, the commuter rail has continued to improve. From 2020 through mid-2024, Keolis hit or surpassed the target on-time performance rate.

Meanwhile, ridership has rebounded more on the commuter rail than on any of the T’s four major subway lines or its buses, at times even recording more monthly trips than in February 2020, the last full month before the pandemic hit.

The commuter rail network has been a bright spot nationally, too. A report from the federal Government Accountability Office published in May examined the ridership changes at 31 commuter rail networks across the country from the second half of 2019 to the second half of 2024.

The MBTA commuter rail ranked sixth overall in bringing back passengers. All five networks that did better — TEXRail in Texas, SMART in California, MetroRail in Texas, Tri-Rail in Florida, and the Downeaster in New England — each transported only a fraction as many riders as did the T’s commuter rail.

Experts said credit should be shared between Keolis and the MBTA itself, which embraced major schedule changes to run less service at traditional peak hours and more service in the middle of weekdays or on weekends. Trips now are more predictable, with a so-called “clock face” schedule offering service in the same window every hour (think 6:15 p.m. and 7:15 p.m., rather than 6:23 p.m. and 7:31 p.m.).

That seems to be a better fit for a post-pandemic work habits, in which many employees head into offices for only part of the day a few times per week.

Since 2018, the commuter rail has also offered a $10 weekend pass that proved even more popular after the pandemic, contributing to growing ridership.

“No one side is getting all the credit here,” said Janet Cheung, regional rail lead for advocacy group TransitMatters, who said the T and Keolis both deserve praise.

Pollack thinks the decision to extend Keolis opened the door to those improvements.

“If the [MBTA board] and Keolis and the T had not agreed to the four-year extension in those early months, and given COVID time to run its course, and time for the regional rail thinking to advance, and time for at least some people to start to come back to the places that commuter rail runs, commuter rail wouldn’t have the ridership it has in 2025,” she said.

In a statement to CommonWealth Beacon, Keolis North America CEO Brad Thomas touted improved on-time performance in the past five years, more frequent service during the day, and better fare collection as markers of success.

“Our passengers have a safer, more frequent, and more reliable service than ever before, while momentum toward the MBTA’s vision for regional rail has never been greater,” Thomas said. “Keolis remains fully committed to realizing that vision.”

The company is not without problems today. Last spring, Keolis canceled or delayed trains on the new South Coast Rail expansion soon after it opened due to staffing shortages, prompting the T to issue fines. A report from state Auditor Diana DiZoglio’s office last year also found the T failed to assess more than $3.3 million in performance-based penalties against Keolis.

But Keolis has at least fared well enough to earn a spot on the shortlist for the next long-term contract.

MBTA officials last month named three “teams” that will be able to vie for operation of the commuter rail starting in July 2027: the joint group of Keolis and Alstom, a consortium known as Mass Regional Rail, and another consortium known as Transdev North America.

Leaders of the transit agency plan to talk with those three finalists over much of the coming year about what they want the next stretch of commuter rail improvements to look like. Bids will be due in the fall, and the T is likely to pick a winner by the end of the year.

Each bidder has a French connection: RATP Développement S.A. is part of the Mass Regional Rail team, and Transdev’s parent company is based in France.

Mass Regional Rail also features a noteworthy familiar face. One of its members, Alternate Concepts Inc., was founded by former MBTA general manager Jim O’Leary, who previously chaired the Massachusetts Bay Commuter Railroad — which was replaced by Keolis as commuter rail operator in 2014, prompting a legal challenge.

Over the past decade, the MBTA has steadily increased its spending on commuter rail. In fiscal year 2015, the first with Keolis at the helm, the agency budgeted about $397 million for what it calls “total purchased commuter rail service.” The T’s current operating budget for fiscal 2026 allocates $599 million for that line item.

Much of the increase is a result of rising fuel prices. Other cost drivers have emerged over the decade, too, like the launch of service on the South Coast Rail extension, more frequent weekend service across the network, and new anti-collision technology.

Most experts agree the next commuter rail contract will be pricey. Kane expects it will surpass $10 billion, and so he wants lawmakers to take a more active role.

“This contract is too important and too big to be left to the MBTA procurement department alone to manage,” he said. “There need to be legislative oversight hearings of this entire process — not because anyone’s done anything wrong, I want to be very clear. It just is too big that it needs that next level of political scrutiny to make sure that the taxpayers of Massachusetts are getting a good deal.”