Longford Railway Station, Earl Street, Longford, Co. Longford

The four-bay, two-storey structure still carries its projecting end bays to north and south, its hipped and lean-to slate roofs, and even a cast-iron window box on the upper floor of the east elevation, small details that have simply outlasted the century and a half since they were fitted.

The station dates to around 1855, raised by the Midland and Great Western Railway Company to serve the line running from Mullingar to Sligo. It is thought to have been designed by George Wilkinson (1814-1890), an architect with a considerable body of railway work to his name across the same network, including stations on the Mullingar to Longford and Inny Junction to Cavan lines. Wilkinson's hand can be traced in the family resemblance between this building and its counterparts at Dromod in County Leitrim and Edgeworthstown in County Longford, all sharing the same restrained limestone detailing and proportions typical of the company's mid-century house style. At Longford, the station was never a solitary structure; it formed the centrepiece of a working railway complex, standing alongside a footbridge, a signal box, an iron crane and a goods shed, the ordinary machinery of a nineteenth-century line kept largely together rather than scattered or lost.

What survives today is a building still doing its original job, its automatic entrance door and replacement uPVC windows the visible concessions to modern use set against the older fabric around them. The south-facing shelter keeps its stone flagged pavement, chamfered timber posts and timber boarded ceiling, while the west elevation retains a glazed and timber panelled screen with geometric glazing bars, a small piece of Victorian joinery that has resisted the usual replacement with plainer modern fittings. Taken together with the goods shed, signal box and crane that still stand nearby, the station forms one of the more complete surviving assemblies of railway architecture and equipment associated with the Sligo to Dublin line, a working record of how a mid-Victorian provincial station was built, fitted out and gradually adapted rather than swept away.