Foster, Rastrick and Company was one of the pioneering steam locomotive manufacturing companies of England. It was based in Stourbridge, Worcestershire, now West Midlands. James Foster, an ironmaster, and John Urpeth Rastrick, an engineer, became partners in 1816, forming the company in 1819. Rastrick was one of the judges at theRainhill Trials in 1829. The company was dissolved on 20 June 1831.

At the end of the 1820s, Foster, Rastrick and Company produced steam locomotives intended for two railways: one in the USA and one just a few miles from the works at Stourbridge. The local opportunity had arisen after an agreement between James Foster and Francis Downing, the mineral agent of John William Ward, the 4th Viscount Dudley and Ward.

The parties agreed to build a three-mile railway linking coal mines in the Shut End area with a purpose-built canal basin at Ashwood on the Staffordshire and Worcestershire Canal. In America, at about the same time, theDelaware and Hudson Canal Company were developing a rail and canal link between coal mines at Carbondale and the Hudson River.

The Foster, Rastrick and Company built only four steam locomotives (each one having vertical cylinders, placed at the back and each side of the furnace, with grasshopper beams and connecting-rods from them to the crankpins in the four coupled wheels). Three were sent to America and one to the Kingswinford Railway in the Black Country. It has recently been restored as a medical centre

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