Question: Which did construction start on first, the Delaware and Raritan Canal or the Pennsylvania Canal?

Bristol is a borough in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, 23 mi northeast of Center City Philadelphia, opposite Burlington, New Jersey on the Delaware River.  Bristol was first incorporated in 1720 but historically, after 1834 became very important to the development of the American Industrial Revolution as the terminus city of the Delaware Canal providing greater Philadelphia with the days High Tech Anthracite fuels from the Lehigh Canal via Easton.  The canal and a short trip on the Delaware also gave the town access to the mineral resources available in Connecticut, New Jersey and New York via each of the Morris Canal, the Delaware and Hudson Canal, and the Delaware and Raritan Canal, and connected the community to those markets and trade from New York City.  All these factors spurred development of Bristol and nearby towns, explaining in part the industries which developed in the region. <SEP> Wilburtha is a section of Ewing Township in Mercer County, New Jersey, United States.  Located where Wilburtha Road crosses the Delaware and Raritan Canal, it is one of the oldest settlements in Ewing Township and developed due to the construction of the canal in the early 19th century.  The community was known as Greensburg before adopting its current name in 1883.  The Yardley–Wilburtha Bridge once connected Wilburtha to Yardley, Pennsylvania on the other side of the Delaware River.  Today, Wilburtha is primarily a residential neighborhood consisting of detached, single-family homes, the majority of which were built in the 1950s through the early 1980s. <SEP> The Delaware and Raritan Canal (D&R Canal) is a canal in central New Jersey, United States, built in the 1830s, that served to connect the Delaware River to the Raritan River.  It was intended as an efficient and reliable means of transportation of freight between Philadelphia and New York City, especially coal from the anthracite fields in eastern Pennsylvania.  Before the advent of the railroads, the canal allowed shippers to cut many miles off the route from the Pennsylvania coal fields, down the Delaware, around Cape May, and up along the (occasionally treacherous) Atlantic Ocean coast to New York City. <SEP>  The Canal and Works were constructed and assembled over several decades beginning in 1824, the year of the first enabling act and budget items.  It should be understood the "first use of any railway" in North America was the year 1826, so the newspapers and the Pennsylvania Assembly of 1824 applied the term then to the proposed Right of ways mainly for the canals of the Main Line of Public Works to be built across the southern part of Pennsylvania. Pennsylvania Canal "(or sometimes Pennsylvania Canal system)" refers generally to a complex system of transportation infrastructure improvements including canals, dams, locks, tow paths, aqueducts, and viaducts.  Enacted before Railroads gestated during their infancy, the focus of the act was to create through building a canal system, the capability to ship heavy or bulk goods and connect Philadelphia to Pittsburgh—and "more importantly"—and "beyond" to the "new growth markets" in the developing territories reached by the Ohio River now called the midwest.  Later, when updated in 1837 to reflect the experience of twelve years of toddler-railways, the term was also applied to railroads and new canals to be added to the state transportation system.  As a crowning achievement, the Main Line of Public Works and the Pennsylvania Canal system topped 2100 ft in elevation by erecting the Allegheny Portage Railroad, which used a system of five inclines and five planes on each side of the Eastern Continental Divide at Cresson Pass in Cambria County to actually haul wheeled flat cars, which had halved canal boats placed on them, up and over the Allegheny Front and connect Pittsburgh to the Susquehanna.  When finished in 1834 the trip from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh could be made in 3–5 days, weather conditions depending.