Accepting Galt's offer to be Chief Engineer, in charge of construction, Gzowski moved his family to Sherbrooke.

In 1850, Galt, along with Luther Hamilton Holton, David Lewis Macpherson and other directors of the St. Lawrence and Atlantic, formed a committee which took steps to secure a charter for the building of a railway between Montreal and Kingston.

In 1851. the Montreal and Kingston Railway Committee commissioned another well-known Canadian engineer and future associate of Gzowski, Walter Shanly, to make another survey of the Montreal-Kingston route.

For that part of the route east of Montreal, Premier Francis Hincks turned the first sod on the Quebec Richmond Railway on January 7, 1852.

While Galt had intended to secure the funds to build the Montreal and Kingston Railway, he did not have the resources to compete with Peto, Brassey Jackson and Betts.

As president of the Toronto Turf Club, in 1859 Gzowski was a prime factor in the creation of the Queen's Plate, the first organized Thoroughbred horse race in North America.

Gzowski was instrumental in organizing the Canadian Society of Civil Engineers, where he served as its first president from 1889 until 1891,[2] and he founded Canada's first rifle association.

As a personal friend of Sir John A. Macdonald, Gzowski was linked to the Conservative Party, even acting as an interim Lieutenant Governor before Oliver Mowat took office in 1897.

On 5 March 1963, the Canadian post office issued a commemorative stamp featuring Gzowski on the 150th anniversary of his birth.