Foster, Rastrick and Company

Foster, Rastrick and Company was an English engineering partnership based at the New Foundry beside the Stourbridge Iron Works in Stourbridge, Worcestershire. The ironmaster James Foster and the engineer John Urpeth Rastrick formed the firm in 1819. It made steam engines, boilers, mills, cast-iron beams and railway components, and it is remembered as one of the pioneering steam locomotive builders. It built only four locomotives, each with vertical cylinders driving the wheels through grasshopper beams. Three were exported to the Delaware and Hudson Canal Company in the United States, including the Stourbridge Lion, the first locomotive to run on rails in America, and the fourth, Agenoria, worked the Shutt End colliery line near Kingswinford. The partnership was dissolved on 20 June 1831 and its assets passed to John Bradley and Company.