O'Hanrahan Railway Station, Redmond Square, Wexford, Co. Wexford

Wrought iron finials punctuate the gable ends, trefoil-perforated terracotta ridge tiles run the length of the slate roof, and a hipped glazed canopy on cast-iron Corinthian colonette pillars shelters the platform side. It is an unusually decorative amount of ironwork and joinery for what remains, at its core, a working transport building, and the symmetry of the whole composition, an H-shaped plan with matching gabled end bays front and back, gives the station a formality that outlasts its practical function.

The building dates from 1890-1, erected by the Dublin, Wicklow and Wexford Railway Company as a permanent replacement for a run of makeshift arrangements stretching back to a temporary terminus opened at nearby Carcur in 1882. Wexford's rail passengers had made do for the best part of a decade before this structure gave the town a station to match its ambitions. The platform canopy, with its ornamental cast-iron columns, was supplied in 1891 by the Thompson Brothers, engineers and contractors based in Wexford itself, tying the finished building to local industrial capacity rather than imported components. Details throughout reward a slow look: fluted timber mullions and diamond-pointed rusticated keystones frame the bipartite windows at each gabled end, cut-granite sills sit beneath the sash windows along both principal elevations, and red brick chimney stacks rise from chamfered cushion courses with corbelled, stepped capping. The rendered walls are ruled and lined in imitation of stonework, a common finishing technique of the period that gave plainer materials the appearance of dressed masonry at a fraction of the cost.

What makes the station worth pausing over is less any single feature than how much of the original fabric has survived intact, inside and out, on a building still doing the job it was built for. The decorative timber bargeboards, the cast-iron rainwater goods with their square-profile downpipes, the moulded door and window surrounds, all remain in place rather than existing only in old photographs. Seven bays wide and a single storey throughout, it makes its presence felt in the town's street scene not through scale but through the density of detail packed into a modest footprint, a reminder that late Victorian railway companies treated their stations as public architecture as much as infrastructure.