Odeon, Harcourt Street, Dublin 2, Co. Dublin

The clue is in the scale: a double-height entrance range with a pedimented portico, its round arch carried on paired columns and flanked by Tuscan colonnades, the sort of grandeur usually reserved for a civic building rather than a place to catch a train. Step further back and the change in materials tells its own story, brown brick and granite giving way to calp limestone, a dark, hard-wearing local stone once quarried extensively around Dublin, in the sheds and vaults that made up the working part of the station.

The building dates to 1859, its foundation year recorded on a granite plaque above the entrance arch, inscribed with the date in Roman numerals. It served as the terminus of the Dublin, Wicklow and Wexford Railway, a role that made it one of the more significant railway buildings in the country at the time, and it is regarded as among the finest work of George Wilkinson, an architect who also designed several other Irish railway stations during his career. The engine shed to the rear, with its apsidal north end raised above a vaulted podium, later did service as bonded warehousing before the whole complex found its current life as a bar and restaurant. Look closely at the north elevation and there is still evidence of repair work carried out after a train crash in 1900, an accident that gained a certain notoriety in its day.

Traces of the original station survive in the fabric if you know where to look: the elliptical windows with their sandstone architraves and lattice glazing, the rusticated granite voussoirs on the vaulted openings, the double round-headed granite arch inside the entrance with its Tuscan columns and triglyph frieze. The vehicular entrance that once served the engine shed from Hatch Street is still there, as is the granite plinth and steps leading down to the footpath. A tram stop nearby offers an unexpected point of comparison, one form of rail transport from the nineteenth century sitting within view of its twenty-first century successor.