Drumcondra Railway Station, Drumcondra Road Lower, Saint Anne's Road, Dublin 9, Co. Dublin

Drumcondra's has done exactly that, first in 1901 and again in 1998, with the best part of a century of near-dereliction in between. Walk beneath the stepped brick parapet today and you are looking at a structure that once carried passengers for less than a decade before being all but abandoned, its platform canopies stripped away, leaving only the corbels, those stone brackets that once bore the weight of a roof, jutting uselessly from the wall.

The station was built for the Drumcondra and North Dublin Link Railway, a line that opened on 1 April 1901 and whose passenger services lasted barely nine years, ending on 1 December 1910. Whatever ambitions the DNDLR had for connecting this stretch of the city evidently did not survive contact with reality, and by 1918 the disused building was partly demolished. What remained sat largely purposeless for decades until the station was reincarnated on 2 March 1998 as a stop on the Dublin to Maynooth and Longford commuter line, giving the red brick and limestone shell a second working life it can hardly have anticipated. The building itself is a seven-bay, two-storey structure on an irregular L-shaped plan, its Flemish bond brickwork rising from a chamfered limestone cushion course to a stepped parapet with limestone coping, the whole arrangement more functional than showy, built to move commuters up staircases to elevated platforms rather than to impress them.

Even so, someone took care over the detailing. The camber-headed door and window openings are edged in red brick voussoirs with bull nose reveals, a softening of the brick's hard edge that catches the light differently depending on the hour, and the paired central windows are fitted with glass block panels rather than plain glazing, an unusual choice that adds a faint industrial glint to an otherwise plain street front. The pairing of vibrant red brick against silver-grey limestone gives the building a visual interest that its strictly practical layout, all arched openings following the line of the internal stairs, would not otherwise suggest. It is worth noticing, too, how little fuss the architecture makes about its own long interruption; nothing about the facade tells you it once stood empty and half-demolished for the better part of eighty years.