Not Where It Says on the Ticket: Airports and Railway Stations Far from the Places They Are Named After

Airports and railway stations carry the names of places, and sometimes the place is a long way off. I measure the straight-line distance from 4,448 airports with an IATA code to the places they are named after, using Wikidata's places served, airport labels, Natural Earth towns and 11 names under which airlines sell secondary airports, and from 2,888 railway stations and halts in the United Kingdom to the settlement that begins their name. Half the airports lie within 5.6 km of their namesake and 3.3% lie more than 30 km away. The farthest confirmed cases are Châlons Vatry, sold as Paris-Vatry (136.1 km from Paris), Chicago Rockford (126.3 km), Tongren Dejiang (110.0 km), Frankfurt-Hahn (103.2 km) and Memmingen, sold as Munich West (100.6 km); twelve of the fifteen farthest are second airports for a city that has a closer one. In Britain, London Oxford Airport is 90.0 km from London. Stations are tighter: half lie within 0.58 km of the settlement in their name and 169 lie 2 km or more away, the farthest being airport stations, parkways and the Victorian "Road" stations, of which 9 are named after a village 2 km or more distant. Because rankings concentrate data errors, every airport case of 40 km or more and every station match of 3 km or more was read by eye: 41.6% of the 113 airport cases and 79.0% of the 286 station matches were wrong links, homonyms, streets, regions or unresolved.

Interactive page: https://maps.tristanhotham.com/far-from-home/. Data and code: https://github.com/Tristan-Hotham/far-from-home. Blog post: https://blog.tristanhotham.com/2026/10/31/far-from-home/.

Sources: Wikidata (CC0), queried with QLever; OpenStreetMap contributors (ODbL); Natural Earth (public domain). Station tables derived from OpenStreetMap are released under the Open Database Licence; airport tables CC0; text and figures CC BY 4.0; code MIT.