QLN. CAPE. BSB. Where are you?

A new code every day at midnight IST. The daily pool is 392 well-known stations (big junctions, terminals and stations with articles in several Wikipedias); autocomplete knows 3,804. Your results stay in this browser. No accounts, no tracking, no ads.

Three things we found in 9,553 station codes

1. DEL is not Delhi. It's a halt in Andhra Pradesh.

3,781 of the 5,360 three-letter station codes (71%) are also the code of an airport somewhere in the world, which is unsurprising: both systems crowd into the same 17,576 combinations. Narrow it to Indian airports and 75 codes are shared, but only 2 of them are in the same place: LKO (Lucknow, 9 km from the airport) and GWL (Gwalior, 10 km). The other 73 send you somewhere else entirely.

2. Some codes still remember names the cities dropped

Across all 9,553 stations, only 281 codes (2.9%) start with a different letter from the station's name. Among the 411 well-known stations in the daily pool it's 29 (7.1%), more than twice the rate, because big stations got their codes early and kept them through a renaming. Kollam is still QLN for Quilon.

The old names are well-documented historical spellings, added by hand. The "different first letter" count is computed from the data. Some mismatches are not renamings (for example NZM for Hazrat Nizamuddin uses the second word, and SBC's B and C are "Bangalore City").

3. B, K and S start a third of all codes, and some codes are just words

Most codes are 3 letters (5,360) or 4 (3,847). There are 313 two-letter codes, 27 five-letter ones, and 6 single letters, including Gondia (G), Raipur (R) and Jalna (J). The first letters follow Indian place names, not English: lots of B (Bhagalpur, Bokaro…), K and S, and almost no X, Q or Z.

325 codes are in a list of the 10,000 most common English words (the list includes some abbreviations). The four-letter ones are the fun part:

BIRD Bhiwandi RoadBURN BurnpurSKIP Ambajora ShikariparaSPAM Senji PanambakkamGUNS GhunasMASK Maisar KhanaPALM PalaiyamSNAP Sona ArjunpurCROP CherlopalliABLE AmbaleCAPE Kanniyakumari Terminus

Caveats

• Station codes, names and coordinates come from a Wikidata snapshot of 25 Oct 2026 (property P5696). Wikidata can lag renamings: we corrected Faizabad to Ayodhya Cantt by hand, and some names may still be stale.
• We checked 20 codes from the daily pool against their English Wikipedia infoboxes and all 20 matched. For the airport table, DEL, MAA and PNQ were checked on Wikipedia; BOM (Bomadra, Pali, Rajasthan) and BLR (Balganur, Gadag, Karnataka), which have no Wikipedia article, were checked on RailYatri and eRail.
• States come from placing each station inside current state boundaries (geoBoundaries), because Wikidata still files some Telangana stations under Andhra Pradesh. Zones come from each station's railway division on Wikidata and are missing for some smaller stations.
• Airport codes come from Wikidata (P238) and include some closed or military airfields. "Same city" means within 50 km.
• Distances in the game are straight-line, not by rail.

Sources

• Wikidata P5696, Indian Railways station code, plus P625 (coordinates), P137 (operator/division) and P238 (IATA airport code), via the Wikidata Query Service. CC0.
• geoBoundaries India ADM1 (state and UT boundaries; source DataMeet India and the Election Commission of India; CC BY 2.5 IN).
• English Wikipedia station articles, for the spot-checks.
• google-10000-english word list (from Google's Trillion Word Corpus n-grams).