Sallins and Naas Railway Station, Sallins, Co. Kildare

The building has stood disused for some time, yet its gables still cut a crisp line against the sky, its render is unbroken, and the intricate detailing around its doorcases has not been allowed to crumble. It is the kind of structure that looks, at a glance, as though the trains might still be due.

The station was opened in 1846 as part of the Great Southern and Western Railway's expansion, a period when Irish rail lines were being pushed out from Dublin to link smaller towns with larger urban centres and ports, altering how people and goods moved around the country. Built to a symmetrical, Tudor Gothic design, it presents two quite different faces. The south-east elevation, facing the road, is rendered and ruled and lined (a finishing technique where wet render is scored to imitate the regular joints of ashlar stonework) and centres on a steep gabled porch with an ogee-headed doorway, its curved profile rising to a point, set beneath a moulded hood and a rendered shield. The opposite side, facing the platform, is built in fine red brick laid in Flemish bond, with cut-stone quoins at the corners and its own gabled doorcase, along with a canted bay window that projects gently from the ground floor. Small shields and inscribed motifs decorate the flanking gables, and finials top the parapets, details that reward a second look rather than a passing glance. The building has been likened in style to the former station at Athy, part of a family of similarly ornamented stops along the same network.

Though no longer in use and its openings now blocked, the structure remains set back from the road within its own grounds, with a tarmacadam area to the front where a carpark once served passengers, and the old platform, still surfaced with concrete cobbling, running along the rear. The contrast between the two principal fronts, one rendered and formal for arriving travellers, the other in patterned brick for those waiting to board, is easiest to appreciate by walking around the full perimeter of the building rather than viewing it from a single side.