Thomas Knox, an owner of one of the collieries, petitioned the Irish Parliament in 1709, to advocate the cutting of a canal to enable the resource to be transported more easily.

They asked Parliament in 1753 for help with building 3 miles (4.8 km) of road, to link Drumglass to Coalisland, and received £4,000 to carry out the work.

In 1760 a parliamentary committee asked Thomas Omer to carry out a survey for a canal between the collieries and the Newry Navigation.

Omar passed the supervision of the project on to a British architectural engineer called Christopher Myers in June 1762, who completed around 0.5 miles (0.80 km) of the canal near Coalisland, and built part of the first lock.

He then reported to Parliament, outlining the likely cost based on the progress to that point, and concluded that it was impracticable to use the bed of the river.

[3] Although the proposal made by Myers was adopted by Parliament in 1767, and £5,000 granted towards its cost, it was superseded by a plan submitted by Daviso Du Arcort, a Sardinian, otherwise known as Davis Dukart, after a second opinion on the engineering aspects of the project was sought.

The canal would be built on two levels, the first starting from Coalisland, and running into a tunnel, which would be used to provide drainage for Derry Colliery.

The canal sections were completed by mid-1773, but Dukart experienced problems with provision of power to make the inclines work.

William Jessop was sent to inspect the works by John Smeaton, both of whom were involved in surveying a route for the proposed Grand Canal from Dublin to the River Shannon.

[5] Dukart could still not get the inclines to work well, and replaced the rollers with parallel railway tracks, down which the boats were carried on cradles.

In 1787, when an engineer called Richard Owen was sent by the Corporation for Inland Navigation to inspect the route, he found the hurries suffering from mechanical failure and little water in the upper section.

He suggested the replacement of the tub boats by flat-bottomed barges on each level, 40 by 13 feet (12.2 by 4.0 m), each of which would carry two rows of seven wagons.

Echoing Dukart's first design, he also suggested a new canal, some 3.7 miles (6.0 km) long, running from below Coalisland basin to Drumglass.