The cross supports beneath a water tank measuring sixty feet by thirty feet meet at these decorative junctions, a small flourish of Victorian industrial design that most passengers waiting for the Cork train will never think to look for. The tank itself rests on fifteen cast-iron pillars, and the platform canopies overhead are carried on similar ironwork, with wrought-iron cross bearers, though three of the original cast-iron pillars were at some point replaced with wrought-iron equivalents. A covered passenger bridge, standing on eight cast-iron pillars, spans the tracks to reach a central island platform. None of this announces itself; it simply exists, quietly doing what it was built to do in 1849.

The station was built by William Dargan, the Cork-born engineer and contractor who was responsible for a large portion of Ireland's early railway network, as part of the southern link connecting Dublin to Cork. The stone buildings, goods depot, and ironwork infrastructure date from that original construction. The junction character of the station developed over the following years: a branch line to Kerry was added to the south in 1853, and a Fermoy branch line was inserted to the north, opening in 1861 and running until its closure in 1967. To the south of the station, the line crosses the Blackwater River on a ten-arched bridge, built on abutments of coursed ashlar limestone with a rock-faced finish. During the 1920s the bridge was partially blown up, a casualty of the turbulence of the period, and was subsequently rebuilt using those same earlier abutments. The eight-bay goods depot in stone remains part of the complex, alongside a more modern corrugated sheeting depot and a gantry crane installed for containerisation, the whole site carrying its layers of history in a fairly unselfconscious way.