Mullingar Railway Station, Clonmore Road, Mullingar, Co. Westmeath

The shelter's hipped slate roof, held up on cast-iron columns and finished with pierced timber bargeboards, still runs its length even though no train now stops beneath it. A rubble limestone building sits behind, windowless on the platform side, its square-headed doorways trimmed in brick and fitted with timber sheeted doors that give nothing away about what went on inside unless you already know.

What went on inside, in at least one room, was telegraphy. These structures belong to the Midland and Great Western Railway Company's operation at Mullingar, a station that opened in 1851 as part of the line running through to Galway. The buildings seen today, though, are thought to date from a rebuilding of the station in 1856, making them a slightly later layer than the original opening. One room in the southern building served as a telegraph office, the means by which stations communicated train movements and signals along the line before telephones existed, and it is said to retain its early fittings, a rare survival for a functional space of this kind. Further east along the platform stands a plain three-bay timber shed with a corrugated metal roof, evidently a working rather than a decorative structure, and at some point a subway was built to carry passengers under the tracks; it is blocked now, sealed off from the platform it once served.

Taken together with the main station building to the north, this group is reckoned among the better surviving examples of its type in Ireland, not because any single piece is exceptional but because so much of the ensemble, shelter, telegraph room, shed and subway entrance, has come down together with its early form and fabric largely intact, even in disuse.