Blink and you'll miss them: Indian Railways reveals its shortest station names

The Indian Railways on Sunday shared two tiny names in its vast network - Ib in Odisha and Od in Gujarat, railway stations whose names contain just two letters each.

"Big network. Tiny names! Ib and Od -  just two letters each," Indian Railways said in a post on X.

An accompanying graphic described Ib and Od as being "among the shortest station names on Indian Railways": "Blink, and you might miss them."

Ib railway station, with the station code IB, is located in Odisha and falls under the Bilaspur division of the South East Central Railway. It lies on the Tatanagar-Bilaspur section of the Howrah-Nagpur-Mumbai line, one of the important east-west railway corridors in the country. The station is situated between Jharsuguda and Brajrajnagar and takes its name from the nearby Ib River.

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The line on which Ib sits provides connectivity towards major railway centres, including Jharsuguda, Raigarh, Bilaspur, and, through the wider trunk route, Nagpur and Mumbai to the west and Tatanagar and Howrah to the east. The station dates back to 1891, when the Nagpur-Asansol main line of the Bengal Nagpur Railway was opened.

More than 1,500 km away, Od railway station, carrying the station code OD, is located in Gujarat's Anand district. It comes under the Vadodara division of Western Railway and sits on the Anand-Godhra railway section.

The route links Anand Junction and Godhra Junction, with local and MEMU services operating along the corridor. Anand provides onward connections on the busy Ahmedabad-Vadodara-Mumbai corridor, while Godhra links the route towards central and northern India.

Od is around 15 km from Anand Junction, while nearby stations include Bhalej and Umreth.

Despite being at opposite ends of the country, Ib and Od share an unusual piece of railway trivia: both have names consisting of only two letters - among the shortest-named stations on the Indian Railways network.