Athlone Railway Station, Southern Station Road, Athlone, Co. Westmeath

The building's proportions are modest, five bays across, two storeys, with a single-storey pavilion set at either end, yet the detailing is anything but utilitarian: snecked limestone walls dressed with crisp ashlar quoins, square-headed windows framed by ashlar architraves and entablatures, and a recessed loggia of three round-headed openings supported on limestone Doric columns. Two limestone roundels sit above the loggia, each fitted with a cast-iron lantern, a flourish more suited to a gentleman's residence than a provincial train stop.

The station dates to 1858, built for the Great Southern and Western Railway Company as part of its Midland line running from Portarlington to Athlone. It was designed by George Wilkinson, an English-born architect who spent most of his career in Ireland and became closely associated with the country's Victorian institutional and infrastructural buildings; his hand can be traced in workhouses, courthouses and stations across several counties, and Athlone shows the same instinct for dignified, restrained classicism applied to a functional building. The hipped slate roof, with its overhanging bracketed eaves and rendered chimneystacks, along with the cast-iron rainwater goods, all point to the quality of craftsmanship that mid-century railway companies were prepared to invest in their showpiece stops. The station was renovated and extended in 1985, and while the original interior has since been replaced, the exterior masonry, particularly the loggia and its Doric detailing, survives as the most legible expression of Wilkinson's design.

Anyone passing through Athlone by rail today is, in effect, walking through a piece of nineteenth-century architectural ambition disguised as ordinary infrastructure. The loggia is worth pausing under before boarding; its round-headed openings and limestone surrounds reward a slower look than most commuters give a station facade, and the roundels above are easy to miss if you are hurrying for a train rather than admiring the brackets on the eaves.