Carrick-on-Suir Railway Station, Cregg Road, Carrick-on-Suir, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Railway Stations
Boarded windows and a missing roof are not the usual signs of a building once considered fine enough to warrant carved stonework, yet that is the condition of the railway station at Carrick-on-Suir today.
Built in 1853, the structure follows a U-shaped plan, five bays long and a single storey, with an extension added to the east. It is the sort of building easily passed without a second glance from the road, and yet its cut limestone cornices and console brackets, the small carved supports beneath the canopy line, point to a level of craftsmanship rarely lavished on purely functional buildings.
The station belongs to a generation of railway architecture that spread across Ireland in the mid nineteenth century, as new lines connected market towns to the wider economy and reshaped how people and goods moved through the country. Carrick-on-Suir's station was designed with the same classical restraint found in stations elsewhere on the network, roughcast rendered walls set off by tooled limestone quoins at the corners, square-headed openings with stone sills, and a rendered chimneystack rising from a roof that has since been removed entirely. A red brick extension to the north, laid in Flemish bond (a brickwork pattern alternating headers and stretchers along each course), is linked to the main building by a length of random rubble limestone walling. To the north platform stands a two-storey signal box, its upper floor rendered and finished with a timber weatherboard on the north side, its ground floor in red brick with a concrete plinth, reached by a flight of recent metal steps. Segmental-headed openings at ground level and square-headed ones above have mostly been fitted with replacement windows and doors, evidence of the building's continued adaptation even as its original railway function faded.
The station sits down a laneway off the main road, enclosed by a random rubble limestone boundary wall and piers with a double-leaf metal gate marking the entrance. Little of the interior fabric can be judged from outside, since the openings have been blocked up, but the exterior still rewards a slow look, particularly at the carved canopy stonework and the contrast between the rendered station building and the brick signal box beside it.