James Foster

James Foster (1786–1853) was a British ironmaster who, in partnership with the engineer John Urpeth Rastrick, operated Foster, Rastrick and Company at the Stourbridge Engine Works in the West Midlands — a firm responsible for two of the most historically significant early locomotives in the world: the Agenoria of 1829 and the Stourbridge Lion, the first steam locomotive to operate commercially in North America.

Born at Stourbridge on 15 August 1786, Foster joined his uncle's ironworks and built up John Bradley and Co. into one of the leading West Midlands iron manufacturers. The partnership with the engineer John Urpeth Rastrick gave the ironworks a locomotive-building capability at exactly the moment when the early railway industry was creating demand for locomotives that could go beyond the colliery waggonways and serve the new commercial railways being promoted across Britain and America.

The Stourbridge Lion, built in 1829 for the Delaware and Hudson Canal Company of the United States, was the first steam locomotive to operate commercially in North America when it ran at Honesdale, Pennsylvania on 8 August 1829 — a milestone in American railway history. The Agenoria, built in the same year for the Earl of Dudley's Shutt End Railway in Staffordshire, was a more conventional colliery locomotive that nevertheless demonstrated Foster Rastrick's capability in contemporary locomotive engineering. The Agenoria survives and is preserved at the National Railway Museum, York. Foster also served as Conservative MP for Bridgnorth from 1828 to 1832 and again from 1835 to 1838. He died at Stourbridge on 13 September 1853.