Colbert Railway Station, Parnell Street, Boherbuoy, Limerick, Co. Limerick

It is an unusual amount of architectural ambition for what is, at heart, a provincial terminus, and the building rewards a slow look rather than a hurried one, particularly upstairs, where the sash windows keep their original timber and the plasterwork has not been simplified away.

The station belongs to the long build-out of the Waterford and Limerick Railway, a company that opened its line in 1848 and kept refining its infrastructure over the following decades. This particular building was designed in 1850 but not opened until 1858, a gap that is not explained further but is not unusual for railway projects of the period, where financing and construction often lagged behind design. The architecture has been attributed to Joshua Hargrave of Cork, who died in 1877, on the strength of its resemblance to his Albert Quay Railway Station in Cork, built between 1850 and 1852; the two share a symmetrical footprint centred on an arcade, silver-grey limestone with sheer and rock-faced dressings, and a parapeted roofline that gives the whole composition a certain formality unusual in utilitarian railway building. The H-shaped plan, with two advanced end bays flanking a recessed centre, is carried through in silver-grey snecked limestone on a chamfered cushion course, with flush quoins and a lead-covered cornice tying the elevations together. Inside, the arcaded booking hall retains its moulded cornices and carved timber door and window surrounds, while to the east a full-height platform shed, roofed in glass on exposed iron trusses supported by pilaster-detailed screen walls, gives a plain demonstration of mid-nineteenth-century engineering sitting comfortably alongside the more self-consciously artistic public rooms. A plaque on the building records that the station was renamed in 1966, a half-century after the 1916 Rising, in honour of Con Colbert, who was born in 1888 and executed in 1916.

Approaching from the street, the setback from the road is marked by limestone ashlar piers with chamfered capping, several of them still topped with cast-iron lamp standards, a small detail that hints at how the whole forecourt was once conceived as part of the composition rather than an afterthought. Inside, it is worth pausing in the concourse before heading for a platform: the ironwork overhead and the cast-iron pillars supporting it are original, and the contrast between the formal stone front and the more workmanlike iron-and-glass train shed behind it is really the whole architectural story of the building in miniature.