In 1846 he founded Ernest Goüin & Cie. (after 1871 Société de Construction des Batignolles); the company initially built locomotives, and diversified into bridge building and railway construction projects.

[2] He was educated at the Ecole Polytechnique, and had achieved the military rank of major, when in 1836 he resigned his commission and began to training in civil engineering at the École nationale des ponts et chaussées He then studied engineering in England, learning at the railway workshops there, and subsequently was responsible for monitoring the construction of locomotives for the Compagnie du chemin de fer de Paris à Orléans at the workshops of the Sharp Brothers in Manchester.

[3] Between 1839 and 1845 he was manager of a railway workshops in Paris on the Paris to St. Germain line; in 1846 he founded his own company Ernest Gouin et Cie. with backing from James de Rothschild, and began locomotive construction.

An economic depression in 1847 affected orders for locomotives and forced Goüin to diversify; as a result his company began manufacturing structural metal constructions, and in 1852 his company built became the first metal bridge builder in France, with a bridge in Asnières.

His company became public in 1871 as Société de Construction des Batignolles, and through it he became involved in railway construction, including crossings of the Pyrenees, Apennines, Carpathians and the Tyrolean Alps, lines in Algeria and Senegal, as well as railway lines in France and Belgium.