“Stourbridge Lion” Locomotive: Facts, History, Photos

Last revised: September 18, 2026

The Stourbridge Lion is the first steam locomotive that ran in the United States. Foster, Rastrick & Company finished it at Stourbridge, England, in 1829. The Delaware & Hudson Canal Company had ordered it, with three sisters, to try steam on the easier levels of a gravity railroad that was supposed to drop Carbondale anthracite to the canal basin at Honesdale, Pennsylvania. Horatio Allen, twenty-six, who had bought the engines in England, took it out alone on August 8, 1829. About three miles of timber-and-strap track had been laid. A trestle carried that track some thirty feet over the Lackawaxen. The machine ran. It came back. It was too heavy. The company put it in a shed and went back to horses and gravity.

It is not the first steam machine Americans had tried. Colonel John Stevens ran a steam wagon on a circular track at Hoboken in 1825–26. It is not the first American-built locomotive. That is Peter Cooper’s Tom Thumb on the Baltimore & Ohio in 1830. It is not the first locomotive in regular American revenue service. That is the South Carolina Canal & Rail Road’s Best Friend of Charleston, Christmas Day 1830. It is the English 0-4-0 that proved, on D&H rails, that a full-size locomotive would move in this country.

The Stourbridge Lion 1931 painting by Sheldon Pennoyer of the locomotive on timber track near a creek

The Stourbridge Lion, a 1931 painting by Sheldon Pennoyer. Later artists put a lion’s head on the boiler front; the engine was named for that face and for Stourbridge, where Foster, Rastrick built it.

On this page: At a glance · What it was—and was not · Jervis, Allen, four English locomotives · As built · Honesdale, August 8 and September 9, 1829 · Sisters and Agenoria · Shed, foundry, Chicago · Smithsonian, 1890 · The Colonie replica · Specifications · Where to see them

At a glance

Item	Detail
What it is	First steam locomotive to operate in the United States. Horatio Allen, Honesdale, Pennsylvania, August 8, 1829. Second trial September 9
What it is not	Not the first steam machine in America (Stevens, Hoboken, 1825–26). Not the first American-built engine (Tom Thumb, 1830). Not the first U.S. revenue locomotive (Best Friend of Charleston, December 25, 1830). Not a regular D&H engine
Builder	Foster, Rastrick & Company, Stourbridge, England, 1829. Named for a lion’s head on the boiler and for the town
Ordered by	Delaware & Hudson Canal Company. John B. Jervis, chief engineer. Horatio Allen bought four locomotives in England in 1828
Cost / arrival	$2,914.90 on delivery. Ship John Jay, New York, May 13, 1829. Assembled at the West Point Foundry’s New York works and steamed on blocks in late May
As built	0-4-0, 4 ft 3 in gauge. Horizontal boiler, vertical cylinders, grasshopper walking beams, wooden wheels with iron tires. Engine about 14,000 lb (~7.5 tons). Jervis had asked for about 4 tons
Track	About three miles of wooden rail faced with wrought-iron strap, including a trestle over the Lackawaxen. The gravity railroad opened October 8, 1829
Sisters	Stephenson Pride of Newcastle (often called America in later American accounts). Foster, Rastrick Delaware and Hudson. English sister Agenoria survives at York
After 1829	Stored. Attempted sale 1834 failed. Boiler in a Carbondale foundry by the mid-1840s. Smithsonian 1890
What you can see	Boiler and remaining parts: Smithsonian, on loan since 1999 to the B&O Railroad Museum (National Museum of Railroad History & Innovation), Baltimore. Full-size replica: Wayne County Historical Society, Honesdale, built at Colonie for the 1933 Century of Progress

Trial dates follow Shaughnessy and the Smithsonian object record. Canal and gravity dates are on the Delaware & Hudson page. Information compiled September 18, 2026.

What it was—and was not

Steam on rails is an English story first. Richard Trevithick showed a locomotive at Penydarren on February 21, 1804. George and Robert Stephenson were still at it when Allen walked their Newcastle shop in 1828. The Rainhill Trials that made Rocket famous were still two months in the future when the Lion ran at Honesdale. The United States imported the idea before it built its own.

Order of the American firsts, scoped tightly:

1825–26, Hoboken. Colonel John Stevens ran a steam wagon on a circular track on his estate. Demonstration, not a common carrier.
August 8, 1829, Honesdale. The English Stourbridge Lion was the first steam locomotive to operate in the United States. Too heavy for Delaware & Hudson track; it did not become a regular engine.
Summer 1830, Baltimore. Cooper’s engine was the first American-built steam locomotive to run on a common-carrier railroad. It was a test machine. That page is Tom Thumb.
December 25, 1830, Charleston. Best Friend of Charleston was the first American locomotive in regular revenue service. Allen, by then, was chief engineer of the South Carolina Canal & Rail Road.
1831, Bordentown. The Camden & Amboy’s John Bull was the first steam on a New Jersey railroad, and the oldest steam locomotive that still exists complete.

The founding decade is the 1820s and 1830s page. This page stays with one English 0-4-0.

Jervis, Allen, and four locomotives

Brothers Maurice and William Wurts wanted Carbondale anthracite in New York. Pennsylvania authorized a canal along the Lackawaxen on March 13, 1823; New York followed April 23. A canal all the way from the mines to the Hudson was impractical: the Moosic Mountains rise more than 1,200 feet. The answer was a gravity railroad from the mines to Honesdale and a canal from Honesdale to the Hudson at Eddyville. The first through canal trip to Honesdale was October 16, 1828. Pennsylvania had authorized the gravity railroad April 5, 1826. It opened October 8, 1829, about seventeen miles, 4-foot-3-inch gauge—after the Lion had already been tried on the first three miles. The company story is the Delaware & Hudson.

John B. Jervis became chief engineer in 1827. He laid out a chain of inclined planes, worked by stationary engines, connected by level stretches of railroad. On those levels he wanted locomotives. In 1828 he sent Horatio Allen, a former coworker, to England with two jobs: buy strap iron, and look at steam locomotives. Allen had authority to order as many as four engines if they looked useful. He was twenty-five going on twenty-six.

He went first to Newcastle. Robert Stephenson & Company was building for the Liverpool & Manchester. Allen ordered one locomotive there, works No. 12. In his letter of June 22, 1829, he called it Pride of Newcastle. Later American accounts, and the D&H company page, usually call it America—a reading of the Stephenson description book that a clerk later titled as an engine “for America.” It cost $3,663.30 delivered, arrived at New York on the Columbia on January 15, 1829, and was steamed on blocks on May 27.

Allen then went to Stourbridge and met John Urpeth Rastrick of Foster, Rastrick & Company. That firm was cheaper. He ordered three locomotives: Stourbridge Lion, Delaware, and Hudson. He also bought about 390 tons of strap iron from a Wolverhampton foundry. The Lion was $2,914.90. It came over on the John Jay and reached New York on May 13, 1829. The West Point Foundry’s New York agent, William Kemble, put it together. Steamed on blocks in late May, it drew crowds who came, a contemporary said, to see the “critter” go through the motions. Delaware ($2,944.40) and Hudson ($2,992.90) arrived in August and September and were sent on to Rondout. They were never tried on D&H track the way the Lion was.

Grasshopper beams on a horizontal boiler

The Lion was already a conventional English locomotive in outline: horizontal boiler, tall stack, four coupled wheels, a small tender behind. The cylinders stood vertically on top of the boiler. Piston rods worked a pair of grasshopper walking beams; connecting rods from those beams drove the rear axle and coupling rods took the front. The boiler was a simple single-flue vessel, about 48 inches in diameter and 10½ feet long, with an external exhaust pipe into the stack. Wheels were wood with iron tires. Gauge was the gravity railroad’s 4 feet 3 inches. Driver diameter was 48 inches. Cylinders were 8½ by 36 inches. Engine weight was about 14,000 pounds, a little over 7 tons; with tender, about 19,800 pounds. Jervis had specified something closer to 4 tons so the timber road would hold.

Side elevation drawing of the Stourbridge Lion 0-4-0 and four-wheel tender

Side elevation of the Stourbridge Lion and its four-wheel tender. Vertical cylinders and grasshopper beams sit on top of the boiler; coupling rods join the two axles.

A lion’s head was painted on the front of the boiler. That is the name. Whether the paint was English or American work is argued; the face is how people remembered the engine.

Side and front elevation of the Stourbridge Lion showing Foster Rastrick boiler front and walking beams

Side and front elevations. The boiler front carries the builder’s name. Cylinders and beams frame the smokebox door.

August 8, then September 9

On July 2, 1829, the Lion and the Stephenson engine went up the Hudson on the steamboat Congress and reached Rondout the next day. Canal boats took them toward Honesdale. The Lion arrived July 23. By August 5 it was on the track. About three miles of wooden rail, faced with wrought-iron strap screwed down, ran west from the canal basin, across the Lackawaxen trestle, toward Seelyville. The rest of the gravity line was still coming.

August 8 was a Saturday. People came to watch, some sure the thing would not move, some standing back in case the boiler went. Nobody would ride with Allen. He had never driven a locomotive. He opened the throttle and went. The engine crossed the trestle, ran out of sight, and came back in reverse. The round trip was on the order of three miles. The locomotive did what it was built to do. The track did not. Strap iron on timber, thirty feet in the air over a creek, was not a road for a 7½-ton engine. A second trial on September 9 confirmed it. The D&H stored the Lion and finished the gravity railroad for horses and stationary engines. It did not buy another locomotive until 1860.

Clyde O DeLand painting of the Stourbridge Lion crossing a trestle at Honesdale with a crowd watching

Clyde O. DeLand’s painting of the first run, the locomotive on the Lackawaxen trestle with the crowd below. The trestle was the weak point as much as the strap rail.

Later color illustration card of the Stourbridge Lion labeled 1829 Stourbridge Lion Steam Loco

A later color card of the engine. Period photographs of the original do not exist; every picture of a complete Lion is a drawing, a painting, or the 1930s replica.

Delaware, Hudson, and Agenoria

Foster, Rastrick built only four locomotives. Three went to the D&H. The fourth, Agenoria, went to work in England in June 1829, ran more than thirty years, and is at the National Railway Museum in York. It is the closest surviving sister: same grasshopper layout, different gauge, a taller stack. When Colonie needed drawings a century later, Kensington’s Agenoria plans were part of the packet.

The Stephenson engine and the two later Rastrick engines never got the Honesdale trial the Lion got. By 1834 the D&H was trying to sell the lot to the Pennsylvania Canal Commission. The deal failed. American shops were already turning out lighter engines. The four imports became a source of English wrought-iron bar until the middle of the 1840s.

A foundry boiler, then Chicago souvenir hunters

By about 1845 the Lion was a boiler. That boiler still worked. A Carbondale foundry used it as a stationary engine into the early 1870s. The Smithsonian’s later object note puts the foundry service to 1871. New owners recognized it as a relic and in 1874 asked $1,000; nobody bought. In 1883 the D&H borrowed the boiler for the Exposition of Railway Appliances in Chicago. Security on the trip was thin. Souvenir hunters took everything loose, and used hammers and chisels on what was not. What came home was more wreck than locomotive.

Smithsonian, 1890

The Smithsonian Institution acquired the boiler in 1890. A walking beam, a cylinder, and four driving-wheel tires are in the same collection; some of those pieces may be from a sister rather than from the Lion itself. The museum tried more than once to rebuild a complete engine around the boiler. The parts list would not support it. Reconstruction was never finished.

Since 1999 the boiler and the assembled remnants have been on loan in Baltimore, first as the B&O Railroad Museum and, from July 14, 2026, as the National Museum of Railroad History & Innovation. The object is still the Smithsonian’s. The museum page is B&O Railroad Museum.

Colonie, 1933, then Honesdale

The Delaware & Hudson built a full-size replica at Colonie for Chicago’s Century of Progress. The company’s own Railroad Bulletin of May 1, 1933, described the job: drawings from Agenoria blueprints at Kensington, a drawing of the original made under Professor James Renwick of Columbia in 1829, and the boiler, cylinder, and walking beam then in Washington. Iron parts were hand-forged. The replica burned anthracite and was meant to run. It is not a tracing of lost 1829 shop drawings. Those drawings were not on the bench.

After Chicago the replica went to the New York World’s Fair in 1939–40, later the Chicago Railroad Fair, and then to Honesdale. The Wayne County Historical Society keeps it in the old D&H Canal office on Main Street, at the basin where the original started. That is the complete Lion you can stand next to. It is a 1933 Colonie engine in the shape of 1829.

Delaware and Hudson replica of the Stourbridge Lion on display at the 1939 New York Worlds Fair

The Delaware & Hudson replica at the 1939 New York World’s Fair. Colonie built it for the Century of Progress; Honesdale has it now.

Specifications

Figures below follow the Bridge Line Historical Society summary that Wikipedia reprints, checked against the Smithsonian model note. They describe the 1829 engine, not the Colonie replica. Jervis’s four-ton specification is the number the track was built for, not the number Foster, Rastrick delivered.

Item	Stourbridge Lion (1829)
Builder	Foster, Rastrick & Company, Stourbridge, England
Year	1829
Whyte	0-4-0
Gauge	4 ft 3 in (D&H gravity railroad)
Drivers	48 in. Wood centers, iron tires
Cylinders	8½ × 36 in, vertical, on top of the boiler. Grasshopper walking beams
Boiler	48 in diameter, 10½ ft long. Single flue. Grate about 8 sq ft
Engine weight	About 14,000 lb (~7.5 short tons). Jervis specification about 4 tons
Tender	About 5,800 lb. Four-wheel coal wagon used as tender on the trial
Engine and tender	About 19,800 lb
First run	August 8, 1829, Honesdale. Second trial September 9, 1829

Where to see them

The original is a boiler and a few pieces in Baltimore, Smithsonian property on loan to the National Museum of Railroad History & Innovation. The complete locomotive in Honesdale is Colonie’s 1933 replica, inside the Wayne County Historical Society’s museum in the old canal office. Agenoria, the English sister, is at York. Excursion trains still leave Honesdale on the old canal-basin track as the Stourbridge Line; that operation is a tourist railroad with the Lion’s name, not a surviving gravity road. Confirm hours on waynehistorypa.com and nationalrailroad.org before a trip.

Sources

Shaughnessy, Jim. Delaware & Hudson. Berkeley, Calif.: Howell-North, 1967. Gravity railroad, August 8, 1829 trial, too heavy for timber-and-strap. Company construction authority
Oliver, Smith Hempstone. The First Quarter-century of Steam Locomotives in North America. Smithsonian Institution, 1956, pp. 14–21. Delivery, John Jay, West Point Foundry, Honesdale trials
Smithsonian Institution. Model of the 1829 steam locomotive Stourbridge Lion, object nmah_687356. August 8 and September 9, 1829; foundry service of the boiler to 1871; Smithsonian 1890; walking beam, cylinder, and four tires; replica 1933
Delaware & Hudson Railroad. “Stourbridge Lion Runs Again.” Delaware and Hudson Railroad Bulletin, May 1, 1933, pp. 75–76. Colonie replica; Agenoria drawings from Kensington; Renwick 1829 drawing; Smithsonian boiler, cylinder, walking beam
Brown, William Henry. The History of the First Locomotives in America. New York: D. Appleton, 1874. Contemporary “critter” notice; Allen on August 8
Wayne County Historical Society. The Stourbridge Lion and the Birthplace of America’s Commercial Railroad. Allen in England; $2,915; three miles of wooden track and the Lackawaxen trestle
State, Raymond. “The Truth Behind the Pride of Newcastle.” Railroad History, 2009. And The Pride and the Lion, Wayne County Historical Society, 2011. Stephenson works No. 12 as Pride of Newcastle; America as a later reading
Bridge Line Historical Society. Stourbridge Lion notes (weight, grate, boiler, cylinders) as reprinted in later summaries
American-Rails.com, Delaware & Hudson. Canal first through trip October 16, 1828; gravity railroad opened October 8, 1829; second trial September 9; 1933 Colonie replica at Honesdale
American-Rails.com, Railroads in the 1820s/1830s and Tom Thumb. Order of the American firsts
B&O Railroad Museum / National Museum of Railroad History & Innovation. Smithsonian boiler on loan. Rebrand July 14, 2026, name change note

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