These were limited by the terms of the 1792 Act to reaching works within seven miles of the canal, and owners of works and pits outside that limit keenly felt the disadvantage. The Tredegar iron works, and others in the Sirhowy Valley, were among those for which a suitable transport connection was urgently needed. Samuel Homfray, Richard Fothergill and Matthew Monkhouse were the co-founders of the Tredegar Ironworks, and a lease of 20 March 1800 from the landowner Sir Charles Morgan granted them not only the right to extract coal and iron ore from his land, but to build a tramroad on it "down the Sirhowy Valley to join the Monmouthshire Canal". The Monmouthshire Canal Company heard of this and negotiated with the Tredegar partners. The engineer Benjamin Outram was called in by the Directors of the Monmouthshire Canal to make recommendations for improving the situation in general. He reported later in 1800, and so far as the canal itself was concerned, he limited his proposals to the provision of additional reservoir capacity, to deal with the water shortage. Instead of proposing an extension of the canal, he considered that a new line of plateway from Tredegar to Risca Church should be built. It would connect with the existing canal at Risca, and loads would be transferred there to barges. The line would have "all convenient turnouts", that is, passing loops—the previous local tramways had been simple single lines, and empty wagons ascending were manhandled off the track to allow loaded descending wagons to pass. In fact double track would be laid if necessary. His railway would be a plateway, in which the rails are L-shaped plates, the upstand providing the guidance to plain wagon wheels; the gauge was to be . The Canal Company accepted his recommendations on 18 December 1800. There must have been a joint discussion with the Tredegar partners, for on the same day an undertaking was signed by the Canal Company; they promised to build at their own expense a tramroad from the Tredegar Works to a point on the canal near Risca Church by Christmas Day 1801. In fact nothing of the sort was done; the Monmouthshire Canal Act of 26 June 1802 authorised the tramroad, but it was the Tredegar partners who had to build most of it. Homfray, Fothergill, Monkhouse, Thompson and Foreman, now also directors of the newly incorporated Sirhowy Tramroad Company, were to make the tramroad at their own expense from the Sirhowy Works to a location west of Risca, nine miles from Newport: it soon became known as Nine Mile Point.