Edgeworthstown Railway Station, Dublin Road, Edgeworthstown, Co. Longford

The snecked limestone walls, the dressed quoins at the corners, the tooled surrounds around every window and door: none of it has been stripped out or smoothed over in the way so many stations were during later refurbishments. Even the timber piers supporting the lean-to canopy on the platform side survive, carved and square in profile, holding up a roof that still shelters passengers from the weather much as it always did.

The station was built between 1850 and 1855 by the Midland and Great Western Railway Company, part of the push to link Mullingar with Sligo. The design is generally attributed to George Wilkinson, an architect of some standing in his day who produced a run of similar stations for the same company along the Mullingar to Longford and Inny Junction to Cavan lines. His hand can be traced in the family resemblance between Edgeworthstown and the stations at Dromod in County Leitrim and at Longford town, all sharing the same restrained Victorian vocabulary of hipped slate roofs, rendered eaves cornices and cast-iron rainwater goods. At Edgeworthstown the building does not stand alone; it forms the centrepiece of a small group that includes a footbridge and a signal box, both set to the west, together making up one of the more complete surviving railway ensembles from this period of line building in the midlands. Beyond its architectural interest, the station marks a moment when the railway reshaped the economic and social life of County Longford, drawing the town more firmly into national networks of trade and travel.

The building sits north of the Dublin to Sligo line, set back from the road to the southeast of the town, with squared rubble limestone walls enclosing the site. Passengers arriving today pass beneath the same canopy and through openings framed in the same limestone dressings that greeted travellers in the 1850s, a detail worth noticing amid the ordinary business of catching a train.