Roscommon Railway Station, Galway Road, Roscommon, Co. Roscommon

This is not the utilitarian shed that so many rural stations became by the twentieth century. It was built to impress arriving passengers before they had even boarded a train, and it still manages to do so through nothing more than careful stonework and a well-judged silhouette.

The building dates to around 1860, raised by the Midland Great Western Railway Company as it pushed its network westward across the midlands. It is designed in the Elizabethan style, a Victorian revival that borrowed the gables, mullioned windows and decorative stonework of sixteenth-century English domestic architecture and applied them, somewhat unexpectedly, to industrial infrastructure like railway stations, all in an effort to lend prestige and permanence to what was still a fairly new mode of travel. The single-storey building runs to five bays on its street-facing facade and seven along the platform, with recessed wings at each end flanking a central entrance bay that projects forward and rises to its own gable. The walls are of random coursed limestone, tooled and finished with a plinth and cornice, while the windows carry cut stone surrounds with keystones, a small but telling flourish that separates a functional structure from a considered one. Chimneystacks combine cut stone with red brick, and the roofline mixes a hipped section over the north wing with a flat, parapeted roof to the south. On the platform side, a canopy supported on decorative cast-iron brackets shelters the entrance, its corrugated roof a nod to the more purely industrial materials of the age even as the stonework around it remains ornamental. The round-headed doorway at the front, with its label moulding, a projecting stone drip course originally meant to throw off rainwater, above a panelled timber door with sidelights and fanlight, is the kind of detail more often found on a church or gentry house than a ticket office.

The station grounds are enclosed by a random coursed boundary wall with cut stone piers and a cast-iron gate, a modest but complete piece of Victorian estate-style boundary treatment that has survived alongside the building itself. Look, too, at the platform elevation doors, timber and glazed, which mirror the formality of the front entrance rather than treating the working side of the station as an afterthought. Little details like this, repeated across the facade, are what mark the building out as a genuine set piece of railway architecture from the period, built at a time when a station was expected to announce the arrival of a town into the modern transport age as much as to simply move passengers through it.