Station lookup

Everything the industry records about a station

Search above, or pick a station below. Each entry pulls together what several separate reference datasets know about the same place — the passenger-facing details from National Rail's KnowledgeBase, the operational identifiers from Network Rail's location database, and the engineering position from the track model.

• Postal address and the operator responsible for the station.
• Facilities and step-free access, so you can check accessibility before travelling.
• Industry codes — CRS, NLC, STANOX, UIC and every TIPLOC behind the station, which is more than one surprisingly often.
• ELR mileage: where the station sits on the network in miles and chains. A station legitimately has several positions when more than one line serves it.
• Junctions and other non-station timing points too, via the toggle above.

Browse by nation and region

Why one station has so many codes

A station is not one thing to the railway. It is a retail location to the ticketing system, a set of platforms to the signaller, a point on a line to the engineer, and an accounting entity to the settlement system — and each of those built its own identifier decades before anyone tried to join them up.

• CRS — the three-letter code on your ticket and the departure screens. MAN, KGX, EDB. It is the public one, and the only one most passengers ever see.
• TIPLOC — the timing point the timetable is written against. A single station often has several, because a place where lines diverge needs a separate timing point per route, and a train is timed past whichever one it actually uses.
• STANOX — the area-based code the train movement reports use. It groups by geography rather than by station, so neighbouring locations frequently share one.
• NLC — the National Location Code, used by ticketing and revenue settlement to decide who gets paid for a journey.
• UIC — the international code, which matters for services that cross a border.

This page shows all of them together, which is harder than it sounds: no single dataset contains the lot. The passenger details come from National Rail's KnowledgeBase, the operational codes from Network Rail's location database, and they have to be matched to each other before anything can be displayed.

Miles and chains, and why there is more than one

Positions on the railway are measured along a numbered route — an ELR, or Engineer's Line Reference — in miles and chains, where a chain is 22 yards and there are 80 to the mile. So SPC1 0m 10ch means ten chains, a quarter of a mile, along the line coded SPC1.

A station can honestly have several of these at once. Where two lines meet, the station sits at a position on each of them, measured from a different zero — Clapham Junction has more than one position on a single ELR, because the measurement follows the track and the station spans a lot of it. Multiple entries are the correct answer, not duplicates.

Not sure what CRS, TIPLOC or miles-and-chains mean? The FAQ explains the codes. For live trains at a station, use the departure boards.

Guide: what the railway calls a place — why one station has a CRS, a TIPLOC, a STANOX and a NLC, which systems use which, and why ten of the eleven places matching "Corby" are not stations.