Portlaoise Railway Station, Station Road, Portlaoise, Co. Laois

The multiple gables, the broken rooflines, the sheer dramatic massing of the place are, in effect, a disguise: underneath all that Tudor Gothic theatre is a rather ordinary access staircase leading up to the platform. It is only when you circle round to the town-facing façade that the building reveals its double life, presenting a full two-storey elevation that once housed the station master and his family alongside the working railway station below.

The building dates from 1847 and was designed by Sancton Wood, an English-born architect who had won the competition two years earlier to design Kingsbridge Station in Dublin, now known as Heuston, for the Great Southern & Western Railway Company. That win earned him the post of company architect, and in that role he went on to design the stations strung out between Monasterevin and Limerick Junction, most of them in the same gabled, picturesque Gothic idiom. Portlaoise is generally reckoned the more theatrical of these efforts when set against its near relation at Monasterevin, less restrained, more consciously dramatic in its silhouette. The masonry itself is worth lingering over: squared snecked limestone walls rise from a plinth course, punctuated by an assortment of window shapes, square-headed, lancet, and multi-centred, all finished with splayed ashlar surrounds. An oriel window juts from the advanced gabled bay, carried on a wide buttress with elaborate weathered courses, while a pair of lancets below light the ground-floor room beneath it. Two chimney stacks rise on limestone plinths, one arranged diagonally on the eastern gable, and it is on this taller external stack that a heraldic shield bearing the initials GSWR, for the Great Southern & Western Railway Company, sits beneath a square hoodmould. Elsewhere, on the advanced gable itself, a smaller shield carries the monogram SW, a quiet signature from the architect himself worked directly into the stonework.

Taken together with the adjoining building next door, the station ranks among the more significant nineteenth-century public buildings in the town, not through scale alone but through the density of decorative ambition packed into a functional railway structure. The original slate roof, cast-iron rainwater goods, and carved limestone door surround on the eastern gable bay have all survived, even as some elements, the uPVC windows among them, mark more recent interventions. It remains a working station, which means the building is best appreciated slowly, walking its full length from the tarmacadamed path at the front garden round to the platform side, rather than glimpsed from a passing train.