By now just about everyone knows about the traditional old-fashioned ballpark that the Maryland Stadium Authority is building to replace Memorial Stadium, and how much praise the planners have received for bucking the national trend toward larger and less intimate "megastadiums."

With Opening Day at Camden Yards now less than a year off, stadium planners are about to embark on another risk-taking project that could yield equally dramatic results: They have decided that it's not enough just to fix up Camden Station, the historic train depot from which Camden Yards draws its name. Instead, they want to take it back to the way it appeared in 1867 -- complete with a 185-foot clock tower above the central section and three-story cupola-topped towers, each 80 feet tall, over the east and west wings. From Camden Street, Baltimore's born-again train station will look exactly as it did 125 years ago, when it was the largest in the world.

The decision to launch such an elaborate restoration has not been without controversy. At a time when the state has a massive budget deficit and local companies are announcing hundreds of layoffs, one member of a city design review panel asked at a recent meeting, is it right for a state agency to be putting cupolas and clock towers back on an old train station?

"It's a folly," said Architectural Review Board member Phoebe B. Stanton. "I think we have to be discriminating about things like this. . . . I don't see any point spending public monies to restore something that wasn't very good in the beginning, and I'm usually the person who wants to save everything."

The Maryland Historical Trust, although it has signed off on the current plan, would have been perfectly satisfied with a more modest approach, according to Bill Pencek, chief of the office of preservation services. Strictly speaking, he said, any project that attempts to replicate lost elements is not in accordance with federal guidelines, which stress preservation of what remains rather than re-creating what used to be.

Could this be? A local project that is questioned by preservationists for going too far in the direction of historical restoration? To be sure, monitoring expenses is important for all public projects, particularly one as large as Baltimore's $105 million stadium. But in this case there are overriding factors that not only justify the expenditure for a full-blown restoration but practically make it imperative. In many ways, it would be a mistake if the state did anything less.

* Built starting in 1853 but not completed until 1865, Camden Station is more significant for historical reasons than for its architectural merit. It was the principal terminal of America's first commercial railroad, the Baltimore & Ohio, and for years was Baltimore's busiest depot. Along with President Street Station, it was one of the points where Union soldiers in 1861 were attacked by Confederate sympathizers, resulting in the first combat casualties of the Civil War. After Abraham Lincoln was assassinated in 1865, his funeral train stopped there on its journey back to Springfield, Ill. Today, sadly, it is used only as a boarding point for passengers of the MARC commuter train line, and both the interior and exterior are in advanced states of disrepair.

The original building was far more impressive than the one people see today. Two former engineers for the B&O;, John Randolph Neirnsee and J. Crawford Nielson, designed it along the lines of a wingspread Italian villa, with a central portion and east and west towers that made an impressive grouping. To top off the center section they designed a three-tiered Georgian-style clock tower with a bell to announce train arrivals. That central tower made the station the tallest building in Baltimore and, for a while, the largest train station in the world. The tower didn't survive very long, though; by 1867 cracks were discovered and its top two levels were removed for safety reasons and replaced with a more modest cupola. By 1952, the second cupola was gone too, along with both of the side cupolas.

Exact plans for the station's reuse have not been determined by the stadium authority, which intends to solicit proposals from developers later this year and rent the building to the group that submits the best bid. The Orioles already have expressed interest in creating a baseball-oriented attraction, including an Orioles Hall of Fame, a Maryland Sports Hall of Fame and exhibit dedicated to old ballparks. Stadium authority executive director Bruce Hoffman said his agency decided to go ahead with the restoration work this spring so the exterior will be presentable when the stadium opens next year.

For Cho, Wilks & Benn Inc. of Baltimore, the restoration architects for Camden Station, the job was complicated because the building has been "remuddled" so many times over the years. Besides the missing towers, windows and doorways have been altered extensively as interior spaces were revamped, leaving the front facade without its original strong symmetry. The biggest change came in 1898, when the west end was torn down and replaced with a five-story office building that linked the station with the 1,116-foot-long B&O; warehouse, which also dates from 1898. When that connector was demolished last year at the request of the stadium authority, which wanted to provide an opening for pedestrian circulation between the stadium and the warehouse, it further accentuated the building's asymmetry.

The architects decided the best solution would be to take the station back to its 1867 appearance, the most representative of the architects' original intent.

"It's always hard to work with a building that is a patchwork," said principal-in-charge Barbara Wilks. "We felt that once you have to rebuild something, why not go back to the original? That seemed to be the statement that had the most meaning."

Besides, she said, if anyone tried to freeze the station in time now, with its asymmetrical facade and mismatched windows and doorways, "it would be a mess."

* Despite the objections expressed about the project, there are many compelling reasons to support a full-blown restoration.

From a budgetary point of view, the towers and cupolas could add several hundred thousand dollars to the cost of the station restoration, which is budgeted at $1 million to $2 million. (An exact price breakdown will not be available until later this month, when contractors' bids are due.) But because the funding plan ** for the stadium construction uses special lottery proceeds to pay off bonds rather than public taxes, money for Camden Yards can't simply be transferred to feed the homeless or save jobs. Money that is not spent for the station, officials say, would have to be spent for other aspects of the baseball stadium, kept in reserve for the proposed football stadium, or not spent at all.

According to Mr. Hoffman, the stadium authority believes it has sufficient funds to cover the cost of improvements, if bids aren't too high. Because of the recession, he said, bids have been coming in well below estimates for much of the work, giving officials reason for hope that bids will be within budget for the station as well.

Aside from cost considerations, there are many other reasons why the Cho Wilks & Benn approach is right.

First, the current plan is very much consistent with the stadium's theme of harking back to the past. Just as the stadium marks a return to days when ballparks were open to the sky and had natural turf and irregular playing fields rather than cookie-cutter dimensions, the plan for the station marks a return to days when public buildings were exuberant works of architecture rather than bare-bones boxes. Together with the restoration of the B&O; warehouse, it could spark a new era of preservation consciousness in Baltimore.

Second, it makes a powerful honorific statement. Camden Station has long been something of an architectural sleeper because of its bowdlerized condition. Taking it back to its 1867 appearance will transform it from a modest, almost forgettable background building to a memorable gateway for the stadium complex and centerpiece for an emerging renewal district west of downtown.

Third, from an urbanistic point of view, restoring the towers would give the building a new pumped-up scale that would help keep it from getting lost next to the larger stadium next door. It would provide a transition between the new stadium and more established neighborhoods near Camden Yards.

In many ways, Ms. Wilks says, the station is the heart of the district more than the stadium, since it was a rail yard long before it was a sports complex. "I see it as a marker for this part of town," she said of the station. "I would hope this building and the public spaces around it would become the symbol of the whole area."