Ardee Railway Station, Sean O'Carroll Street, Ardee, Co. Louth

This polychromatic treatment, along with an entrance canopy carried on ornate cast-iron cantilever brackets, marks the building out from the plainer railway architecture found elsewhere on the line. The symmetry of the original design has held up remarkably well, with the central gable-fronted bay still flanked by its recessed end bays, and even part of the platform surviving behind the main structure.

The station was built around 1880, a detached, multiple-bay, single-storey building with a shorter nine-bay platform block set to its rear. Its pitched slate roof carries clay roll-top ridge tiles and yellow brick chimneystacks with chamfered bases and moulded corbel courses, while a timber ventilator sits on the ridge near the central bay alongside metal cylindrical ventilators, a practical response to the smoke and steam of the age it was built for. The segmental-headed window openings, with their stepped surrounds and continuous projecting hood mouldings above flush granite sills, appear throughout, on the main elevation and again, in slightly plainer form, on the platform side to the south. The main entrance retains its stepped surround and hood mould too, framing timber and glazed double doors, and the smaller doorways at each end keep their painted timber panelled doors and blind overlights. Even the fascia boards are worked in a dogtooth pattern, painted timber cut to a zigzag profile, and finished with decorative bargeboards and hanging finials at the gable. To the south, within the gravelled yard, stands a three-bay engine shed built of rubble stone with yellow brick dressings and round-headed window openings fitted with cast-iron small-pane windows; its roof has since been removed, leaving the stone and brick walls open to the sky.

The building no longer serves as a railway station and now functions as commercial premises, but the survival of so many original details, the canopy brackets, the chimneystacks, the granite sills, the coloured brick banding, means the structure still reads clearly as what it once was. It stands as one of the more decorative examples of small-town railway architecture from the period, its ornamentation more elaborate than its modest scale might suggest.