There’s always this.
Don’t be so confident in that. Ireland has none outside of Dublin, for instance.
The latter would take you to roughly the extremities of the London postal district.
BQN? Rafael Hernández Airport in Puerto Rico certainly doesn’t come under LON! (Biggin Hill is BQH 
) Don’t forget SEN, either - ‘London Southend’ airport :dubious:
H, N, they’re all the same to me :smack:
And according to wiki, IATA drew the line at Luton and Stansted when they set up LON - Sarfend didn’t make it it (at least, not yet :eek:)
Don’ t plan on using any of these abbreviations if you buy your postage online. Neither the USPS site or postage through Paypal allow for it. In fact, some cities that have common abbreviations as part of their names, St. Louis for example, you must enter the name as Saint Louis. I did just get a small package from Hong Kong, my name, city and state are virtually unreadable. But the numbers for my address, street name and zip code are easily read. The package did get to me.
An idea the OP might try is to look in the sports page of your local newpaper. In the part that lists the results, standing and statistics, abbreviations are the norm, not the exception. This might give you an idea for city abbreviations.
Fair enough. Mind you, if they had a bus link to Rochford station, the train from there takes the same as the Stansted Scenic Route, also providing a useful link with Shenfield. Surely there’s potential for it to play a bigger role.
Sorry, I meant ‘Stansted Express’, of course.
To confuse the idea of using airport codes, there are two types of codes, IATA and ICAO. For example the IATA code for Broome is BME, and the ICAO is YBRM. I think most people tend to think of the IATA code so you’d best go with that.
Postal worker checking in:
Whatever the USPS might say to you on their website is only what they’re trying to train you to do re correct addressing, but rest assured the software in the high speed sorting machines is loaded up with all sorts of weird and wonderful abbreviations and errors people use. Just as the conventional wisdom for webmasters is to include common spelling errors in their META tags, the world’s postal administrations do a similar thing.
New Zealand has technically had postcodes for about 30 years but until I left 8 years ago no one actually used them. It seems the post office is encouraging their use now though.
http://www.nzpost.co.nz/Cultures/en-NZ/Personal/Postcodes/HowToUseThem/
I’ve posted this before, but putting my postal employee cap on again for a moment, I can assure you that these days, postal codes are approaching their twilight. If I were setting up a new nation from scratch in 2008, I’d not bother with the things.
They’ll be around for a while yet as a legacy system, but they are far from state of the art. I won’t bore you with reasons why, but I’d have money on postal administrations in twenty years (if they exist at all) not bothering with them.
What will they do instead?
Accidentally, while looking for something else, I found an international system of city codes: UN/LOCODE, the United Nations Code for Trade and Transport Locations. The Wikepidia article on it is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UN/LOCODE, while you can search for the codes at http://unlocode.hmap.info/. It seems to be based in part on IATA codes for airports.
You can use a variation of CLLI (Common Language Location Identifier) Codes utilized by telephone companies in North America. Wiki has a good explanation of them along with examples of different codes. It shouldn’t be too hard to adapt the format to include international locations.
Almost forgot–here’s the link:
Here’s a list of Metro codes: