Behind the overall pattern of growth in the coal trade lay a complicated system of organization comprising production, transportation and marketing. These functions remained separate for much of the period. The coal owners, the Lowthers in particular, were generally individualists, investing in their collieries to the limit of their financial abilities, facing up to such problems as drainage and transport to the quayside, and regulating their profits according to capital expenditure. Before the mid-1730s they had little direct interest in shipping, but sold at the quayside to the ships' masters. (Cumberland had no equivalent of the Tyneside ‘fitters’.) In turn, the masters disposed of the coal in Dublin, usually to middlemen, for marketing. As a result of this structure, the skippers tended to be squeezed between the two land-based interests. Faced with a tacit agreement on prices amongst the Cumberland owners, and an Irish parliament prone to pass punitive legislation if prices in Dublin rose too rapidly, the masters only occasionally succeeded in raising their profits by combined action against either the owners or the market. The fear of cutting off their own livelihood, reluctance to search out new markets, dependence on coal for all profits, and fierce resistance to becoming merely carriers, contributed to an endemic lack of organization amongst the masters. Together these pressures served to ensure that their profits were generally small.

Whilst the component parts of the trade were separate, all three had considerable interests in common, the owners and masters in particular. With only a limited demand for coal in Cumberland, the owners depended on selling in Ireland.