Moate Railway Station, Station Road, Moate, Co. Westmeath

Three bays wide, single storey, with gable-fronted sections at either end and an open veranda in the centre, it is built of brick raised on a cut stone plinth, with rusticated quoins, cut stone broken pediments carried on stone brackets, and a slate roof finished with clay ridge tiles and rendered chimneystacks topped by terracotta pots. None of this was strictly necessary for a country station. That it is there at all says something about the ambitions of the company that built it.

That company was the Midland and Great Western Railway, which opened the Mullingar to Galway line in 1851, the year this station is thought to date from. The line ran for well over a century before closing in 1987, and Moate's station survives as one of the better preserved reminders of what that railway once looked like along its route. The quality of the stonework and the classical detailing, particularly the broken pediments and quoins, have led to suggestions that the architect J.S. Mulvany may have had a hand in the design, as he is known to have worked on other stations along the same line, including Athlone. Mulvany was one of the more accomplished architects working for Irish railway companies in this period, and buildings attributed to him tend to show exactly this kind of restrained but confident classical ornament applied to otherwise functional structures. To the west of the station, cattle sidings survive as a quieter piece of evidence: a reminder that Moate was, for much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a significant market town for livestock, and that the railway existed as much to move cattle as passengers.

The building today stands disused, its windows blocked and its original doors sealed, though the entrance on the north elevation retains a flight of cut stone steps flanked by ashlar plinth walls, cast-iron railings and limestone piers, giving some sense of how a passenger would once have approached the platform. The platforms themselves survive on either side of the former track, built in brick with a decorative corbel course and cut stone coping, and together with the station building and its flanking single-storey extensions they form a coherent group of structures, unusual for having remained largely intact rather than being demolished or substantially altered after the line's closure. It sits to the north of the town, and its condition, currently at risk of further decline, makes it one of those buildings whose architectural interest is easier to appreciate now than it may be in years to come.