Speaking the Lingo

[rrdude]

Sometimes some of the airport codes have a little bit of history hiding in them. For example Chicago O'Hare is ORD because it was originally called Orchard Field. Orlando International is MCO, because its original name was McCoy Field.

Sometimes having the Amtrak station code for the city station being different from the airport code works out well. For example, Newark NJ, where the Amtrak station is NWK and the airport is EWR. When the Newark Airport Station was built it naturally got the code EWR. Can you imagine the headache it would have been if Newark Penn had the code EWR? BTW the ICAO code for Newark Airport is KEWR. Indeed in most cases you can get the ICAO 4 letter code for an US airport by pre-pending a K to the 3 letter IATA code for the airport.

Many Amtrak stations have their own IATA codes too, specially those that have code share service between Amtrak and an airline (typically Continental).

I now have an ice-cream headache.........

 

[Dan O]

I can't think of another airport where people ALWAYS refer to it by its code! As many friends elsewhere would say, well, what would you expect about LAX, er, Los Angeles??? :help:

BWI

I think of it as Friendship. Guess that dates me.

Dano

 

[ALC Rail Writer]

EWR is so much more convenient than "Newark Liberty International Airport"

JFK is very often used, including in most signage in the subway system pointing to Sutphin Blvd station on J and E as the transfer point to JFK Airtrain.

Back to Amtrak, I am starting to hear a few people use NYP to refer to Penn Station, but not that much.

GCT is becoming popular, mainly because that's how it prints out on MN tickets, but still--

 

[PRR 60]

I can't think of another airport where people ALWAYS refer to it by its code! As many friends elsewhere would say, well, what would you expect about LAX, er, Los Angeles??? :help:

BWI

I think of it as Friendship. Guess that dates me.

Dano

I think of JFK as Idlewild. What's that make me? :lol:

 

[Devil's Advocate]

Sometimes some of the airport codes have a little bit of history hiding in them.

Sometimes it's history and sometimes it's a warning that you won't be arriving anywhere near your intended destination, as in the case of NRT.

I've never in my life even once heard anyone say Lax, as in laxative. Never.

Same here.

EWR is so much more convenient than "Newark Liberty International Airport"

It's always just "Newark" around here.

I've heard people call JFK "Kennedy" enough times that I don't think it qualifies. LAX and DFW are definitely in the running though. I honestly cannot remember anyone calling them by any other name in all the years I've been flying. How about airports with nearly unpronounceable names like Suvarnabhumi. Much easier to just say "BKK" instead. :lol:

 

[the_traveler]

I think of ALB (the airport) as "Albany County Airport" (from the 34 years i lived in the area), not "Albany International Airport"!

BTW - I don't even think there are international flights there. There were back in 1983-1984 when I worked for Mall Airways. We had flights to Montreal and Toronto - with 15 passenger props. However at that time, it was still called "Albany County Airport", and I think Mall Airways is now out of business.

 

[the_traveler]

sometimes it's a warning that you won't be arriving anywhere near your intended destination, as in the case of NRT.

I would still say "I'm flying to Tokyo"!

Closer to home, if someone is flying in from London or Paris or Moscow and flying to IAD, I seldom hear them say "I'm flying to Dulles". Instead they say "I'm flying to Washington, DC"! (Dulles is miles from Washington.)

 

[GG-1]

I can't think of another airport where people ALWAYS refer to it by its code! As many friends elsewhere would say, well, what would you expect about LAX, er, Los Angeles??? :help:

BWI

I think of it as Friendship. Guess that dates me.

Dano

I think of JFK as Idlewild. What's that make me? :lol:

My Age :hi: :lol:

Aloha

 

[spacecadet]

SFO? I don't think so. I doubt that more than 10% of passengers on any San Francisco-bound flight would know SFO.

When I lived in San Francisco, almost everybody I knew just said SFO. I even knew people that would say "Oak" (as in OAK) for Oakland airport.

It may not be 100% usage, but it's vastly higher than 10%.

As for JFK, we use JFK and Kennedy pretty interchangeably. You even see both printed on official signs: Kennedy Airport and JFK Airport

 

[Devil's Advocate]

I would still say "I'm flying to Tokyo"! Closer to home, if someone is flying in from London or Paris or Moscow and flying to IAD, I seldom hear them say "I'm flying to Dulles". Instead they say "I'm flying to Washington, DC"! (Dulles is miles from Washington.)

Does it cost $300 to take a cab from Dulles into DC proper? You're not flying into Tokyo, that airport is called Haneda. You're flying into Narita, which is a whole other city. Thankfully NRT has several trains for rail fans to choose from, offering various speeds, routes, and price points. I've tried the locals, the Skyliner, and the NEX. Both the locals and the Skyliner were pretty full, but the NEX was often quite empty. I guess the cost isn't considered a good value by the resident population and unless you're on an active rail pass I'd have to agree. I've also done the weirdly named "Airport Limousine" bus just to see what it was like. It was nothing special and although I've heard there are groups for bus fans I honestly can't imagine what they see in them.

 

[ALC Rail Writer]

I can't think of another airport where people ALWAYS refer to it by its code! As many friends elsewhere would say, well, what would you expect about LAX, er, Los Angeles??? :help:

BWI

I think of it as Friendship. Guess that dates me.

Dano

I think of JFK as Idlewild. What's that make me? :lol:

A Twilight Zone fan? :lol:

 

[Ryan]

I would still say "I'm flying to Tokyo"! Closer to home, if someone is flying in from London or Paris or Moscow and flying to IAD, I seldom hear them say "I'm flying to Dulles". Instead they say "I'm flying to Washington, DC"! (Dulles is miles from Washington.)

Does it cost $300 to take a cab from Dulles into DC proper? You're not flying into Tokyo, that airport is called Haneda. You're flying into Narita, which is a whole other city.

I've never taken a cab, but I'll bet it's pretty close to that. Sounds pretty similar actually, since IAD isn't anywhere near DC, and DC has its own inner airport in DCA.

 

[ALC Rail Writer]

Can't be more than a hundred, can it? I remember people going from BWI to WAS (the train stations believe it or not) during the Jon Stewart rally for twenty a head. Fannies said it was normally 60 to get to WAS and 80 to get to anywhere else in the city. Of course they could have been blowing smoke up peoples butts because here were many people waiting in a ticket line for sold out trains!

 

[the_traveler]

they could have been blowing soke up peoples butts

I hate it when somebody blows soke! It's bad enough having somebody blows smoke!

 

[ALC Rail Writer]

Posting from a phone has it's downsides, heh, fixed.

 

[Devil's Advocate]

I've never taken a cab, but I'll bet it's pretty close to that. Sounds pretty similar actually, since IAD isn't anywhere near DC, and DC has its own inner airport in DCA.

Rather than continue to speak in vague and impotent terms about what is close or far why don't we look up some actual numbers. According to a couple quick queries Dulles is around twenty-five miles from central DC while Narita is forty-odd miles from central Tokyo. That's a big enough difference to be quite noticeable, I would think.

 

[jis]

I would still say "I'm flying to Tokyo"! Closer to home, if someone is flying in from London or Paris or Moscow and flying to IAD, I seldom hear them say "I'm flying to Dulles". Instead they say "I'm flying to Washington, DC"! (Dulles is miles from Washington.)

Does it cost $300 to take a cab from Dulles into DC proper? You're not flying into Tokyo, that airport is called Haneda. You're flying into Narita, which is a whole other city.

I've never taken a cab, but I'll bet it's pretty close to that. Sounds pretty similar actually, since IAD isn't anywhere near DC, and DC has its own inner airport in DCA.

Totally agree Ryan.

I wouldn't go so far as to call Narita a city. It is at best a largish, and a delightful, village with a beautiful large temple. I actually enjoy staying at some hotel by the Narita Keisei station and commuting into Tokyo.

But in any case what is dax's point? CDG is not in Paris nor is Orly, London Heathrow (by Hayes, Middlesex) or Gatwick are not in London, and IAD is not in Washington. And yet when I fly to CDG I say I am flying to Paris, not to Roissy-sur-something or the other I forget, when I fly to Gatwick or Heathrow or even to Stansted I say I am flying to London. Do you really expect people to only say they are flying to London when they fly to the London City Airport?

And anyone has to be either completely ignorant or a total idiot to try to take a cab from Narita Airport to Tokyo city center, so why talk about it? The right way to get from the airport to the city is the Keisei Express, the JR NeX or the Limo Bus, or for the well heeled even the JR Sobu-Yokosuka line Rapid, which is much cheaper than the NeX, unless you want to flaunt your wealth that is.

 

[PerRock]

LaGuardia factors in, the city isn't named LaGuardia after all.

CAK (also hear Cack), EWR, PDX, DFW, SAC (like 'sack') to name a few more as "ones I've heard in public"

CAK is interesting because the airport code only kinda-sorta matches the city. The airport is Akron-Canton Regional, which seems like it should be AKC, or ACN. Whenever I search for flights out of there I google "CAK departures" versus "Akron Canton Airport Departures".

Except SAC isn't the airport code for Sacramento International Airport. That code is SMF.

We do however say Sac to refer to the actual city in general conversation.

Whenever I hear "SAC" I think of Strategic Air Command, not Sacramento...

peter

 

[jis]

Wow! What a blast from the past!

 

[Henry Kisor]

I'm so old I still think of ORD as Orchard Airport.

 

[Ryan]

Wow! What a blast from the past!

Really!

 

[printman2000]

I too find people using station codes difficult to read and decipher. I always spell out station names. I have abbreviated trains many times but usually only when I am posted quickly from my phone.

I do have a link I use to look up codes when I am interested, but I rarely use it. I usually just skip on posts that use station codes I do not know. It just does not take that much more time to type out the station name so I also would ask people to do it when possible.

Here is the link I have...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Amtrak_station_codes

 

[PerRock]

Sorry about the bump to those who complain. I was reading two threads (and looking for another) about Amtrak Abbreviations, one was newer then the other & I forgot which was which (this one was a much better read then the other ).

peter

 

[George Harris]

Wow! I had not looked at this thread until now. A very typical example of how the conversations on these threads turn. More discussion on airport codes than anything else. I will add mine to that subject and then go back to the original subject:

My home turf airport is Memphis, code MEM. When they opened an airport in Macau, for the geographically challenged, that is the former Portugese colony on the coast of China on the opposite side of the Pearl River estuary from hong Kong, it was given the code of MFM. At the time I wa working in Hong Kong with family in Taiwan. Had to be sure than it was clear when getting a ticket out of Taipei to MEM, not MFM.

Another item of confusion to some of the older crowd, such as me, are such acronyms as IMHO, which I take to mean "in my humble opinion."

Another series of confusion for some of the younger crowd is the habit of some of us to refer certain railroad lines by the names they had before the massive run of mergers of the last 20 to 30 years.

 

[johnny.menhennet]

I know this is old but there are a few things I found worthy of mentioning. In the summer of 2007, we paid $60 flat to get from McPherson Square in central DC to Dulles.

On the airport codes as names issue, I regularly hear LAX, SFO, DFW, JFK, and slightly less frequently, I have heard PHX, PDX, MSP, and MIA used, but still frequently enough that I thought I should mention them. SFO is very common, and I do not call it anything but that when I am here in SoCal or in the Bay Area, and I am always completely understood. While I have never hear lax, I don't even remember hearing Los Angeles International either. I've grown up and known it to be universally used to call it LAX. Those X's at the end sure do make it easier to remember though.

I also thought I should mention Denver. Whenever I am in town here, I almost always will hear someone say that they are flying to Denver. When I am w/family in Colorado, they almost always w/o fail will say DIA. I like that they use DIA, even though that is not even the real code! It is DEN, just like the pax train station, but I have never heard that used in airport/air-context once.