Newtown Forbes Railway Station, Newtown Forbes, Co. Longford

That is the case at Newtown Forbes, just east of the village in County Longford, where a trim two-storey building of snecked limestone has spent rather longer as a private home than it ever did as a working station. The platform edging survives, cut and kerbed, running alongside the house; so does the segmental-headed doorway that once opened straight onto it, its glazed timber door set beneath a neat limestone surround.

The station was built around 1860 for the Midland and Great Western Railway Company, part of the line linking Mullingar and Sligo, and it closed in 1963. It is thought to have been designed by 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 routes, giving this stretch of the midlands a consistent architectural signature in limestone and red brick. The building shows that house style clearly: snecked limestone walling, flush quoins, and a red-brick relieving arch, a structural brick arch built above a door or window lintel to carry the weight of the wall above it, set over the main entrance. Square-headed window openings, since fitted with replacement glazing, still keep their original block-and-start limestone surrounds and tooled sills. A goods shed and signal box once stood to the north but have since disappeared; a wrought-iron pedestrian gate and limestone gate pier at that end of the site, along with a rubble limestone boundary wall, are what remain of the working railway yard. The platform itself would almost certainly have carried a canopy or shelter on its western side, as was standard practice at stations of this size and date, though no trace of it survives.

What is left is modest but legible: a hipped, artificial-slate roof with moulded rendered chimneystacks, a single-storey extension added to the south and rear for domestic use, and a corrugated-metal outbuilding to the south. None of it announces itself as a former station from the road, but the platform kerbing and that odd, purposeful flight of steps up to the door give the game away to anyone walking past with an eye for such things.