Heuston Station, Saint Johns Road West , Dublin 8, Co. Dublin

Trains, after all, were a nineteenth-century intrusion into cities that had already decided what grandeur looked like, and the architect Sancton Wood answered that problem by matching the language of the Four Courts and the Custom House rather than inventing a new one. The result is a station that reads, at first glance, less like an engineering shed than a civic palace.

The building dates to around 1850 and served as the terminus of the Great Southern and Western Railway, making it one of the most consequential railway structures built in the country. It was known originally as Kingsbridge Station, after the cast-iron bridge beside it, and carried that name for over a century before being renamed in 1966 for Sean Heuston, a republican executed after the 1916 Rising. The granite façade rewards close looking: channelled arcading at ground level gives way to a more ornate upper storey with foliate swags, and the balustraded parapet carries carved cartouches bearing the coats of arms of Dublin, Cork and Limerick, the three cities the railway served. An inscription reading 'VII.VIC' marks the seventh year of Queen Victoria's reign, the year of the Act of Parliament that incorporated the GS&WR, a small piece of legislative history folded into decorative stonework most passengers would walk past without a glance. Elsewhere the carving turns playful as well as heraldic: lion's heads sit at the base of the parapet cornice, and the square bellcotes over the flanking wings are treated almost as miniature buildings in themselves, with their own pediments, Ionic columns and acorn-finialled domes.

Much of this ornament sits well above eye level, on the upper storey and parapet, which rewards stepping back from the building rather than walking straight in under the arcade. The contrast Wood built into the design, plain channelled stonework below, increasingly elaborate treatment above, is easiest to read from across the forecourt, where the full nine-bay front and its flanking wings come into view together.