Robert Stephenson and Company

Robert Stephenson and Company was the world's first purpose-built commercial locomotive manufacturer — founded on 23 June 1823 at Forth Street, Newcastle upon Tyne by George Stephenson, his son Robert Stephenson, the Quaker financier Edward Pease, and Michael Longridge — and for its first two decades the most important single source of locomotive engineering knowledge in the world. Every major locomotive development of the crucial 1823–1850 period passed through Forth Street: the first practical commercial locomotives, the first locomotives for public passenger railways, the designs that established the basic anatomy of the steam locomotive, and the engines that equipped the first railways on six continents.

The firm's first product was Locomotion No. 1 for the Stockton and Darlington Railway in 1825. In rapid succession followed Rocket (1829), winner of the Rainhill Trials and establishing the multi-tube boiler and inclined cylinders as standard; the Planet (1830), introducing the inside-cylinder 2-2-0 configuration; and the Patentee 2-2-2 (1833), which became the standard British express locomotive type for the following decade. Forth Street engines worked the opening days of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, the London and Birmingham, the Leipzig–Dresden Railway in Germany, and the first railways in the United States, Belgium, and Russia — making Robert Stephenson and Company the physical origin point of the global railway network.

The firm moved its locomotive operations to Darlington in 1899 and merged with R. and W. Hawthorn, Leslie and Co. in 1937 to form Robert Stephenson and Hawthorns. Acquired by English Electric in 1955, the Darlington works closed in 1960 after building approximately 4,500 locomotives in 137 years. The original Forth Street works in Newcastle is partly preserved as a heritage site. The firm's name on a locomotive was the nearest thing to a guarantee of engineering quality that the Victorian railway world possessed.