Railway Station Codes Explained (NDLS, DLI, MMCT and More)

Every railway station in India carries a short alphabetic code — two to five letters — that uniquely identifies it in reservation systems, timetables and displays. Codes are not shorthand for the station name so much as an identifier: NDLS is New Delhi, HWH is Howrah, MAS is Chennai Central, SBC is KSR Bengaluru. Some are obvious, others are historical.

The code is what you type when booking or searching, and it is what appears on tickets and platform displays. Because it is unique, it removes the ambiguity that plagues station names — which is exactly the point, since several stations across the country share similar names.

A city with more than one terminal gets a code for each. Delhi is the classic example: NDLS is New Delhi, DLI is Delhi Junction (Old Delhi), and there are further codes for Anand Vihar, Hazrat Nizamuddin and others. Mumbai has CSMT, Mumbai Central and Lokmanya Tilak Terminus; Kolkata has Howrah, Sealdah and Kolkata station.

This matters when you book. A train from "Delhi" is meaningless until you know which terminal. If a search returns nothing, the most common cause is searching the wrong terminal — try the other codes for that city, or search by city name and let the tool expand it to every terminal.

Some stations were renamed and their codes changed, but the old code survives in older tickets, agents' systems and travellers' habits. Mumbai Central was long known by the code BCT and is now MMCT; Mumbai's Victoria Terminus became Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Terminus with the code CSMT. A booking site that only knows one of the two will fail on the other.

On IndTrain we resolve these legacy codes for you — typing BCT or CSTM still finds the right station — and every station page shows the current official code alongside the name. If you are unsure which code to use, search by the station's name or city instead and pick from the results.

When you know the code, use it — it is faster and unambiguous. When you do not, search by name or city. And when a journey involves a change of station within one city, check both codes carefully: a connection that looks tight on paper can be a forty-minute road transfer between two terminals that share nothing but a city name.