George A. Harwood

Perhaps the most remarkable engineering feat of our time, all circumstances and obstacles considered, was the construction between 1906 and 1914 of the new Grand Central Terminal. It was not the “tube-and-terminal problem” which had confronted the Pennsylvania five or six years before. In that undertaking, not a train had to move from Thirty-fourth Street under the river until Cassatt’s men shifted part of his railroad’s passenger traffic from the old Jersey City ferry-house to the completed uptown terminal. But the New York Central had to build a new underground level up from Forty-second Street to One Hundred and Tenth, new and extensive underground yards, four-track electrified facilities to Harmon, and to do all this without interruption to movement of the hundreds of through and local trains which passed daily into and out of the same terminal on the old level. This stupendous undertaking was completed in schedule time without derangement of the regular service, and George Alec Harwood was one of its chief promoters.

Coming to the Central only as a draftsman, after the new program had been started, he displayed such outstanding talent as to win successive promotion until terminal tracks, excavation and overhead street construction had been placed entirely in his charge, with finally the whole civil engineering program out to Croton and North White Plains entrusted to him. With our fellow-member Wilgus in command, and Katte and Reed charged with electrification and terminal architecture, he performed his part of the memorable achievement. An engineer of outstanding ability and integrity and a gentleman with all that the title implies, is the description of Harwood by his associates in it.

Alexander Dana Noyes
1927 Century Association Yearbook