When a line short-circuit fault occurs in a DC distribution network, the fault current rises quickly and affects a wide range, jeopardizing the safe operation of the system. In order to locate the fault quickly and accurately, this study proposes a fault localization method based on the Variational Mode Decomposition (VMD) and Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (Bi-LSTM) networks. First, the nonlinear relationship between the intrinsic principal frequency and fault distance is analyzed; then, the intrinsic principal frequency of the faulty traveling wave is extracted by using VMD, and the nonlinear relationship between the spectral energy of the principal frequency of the intrinsic frequency and the fault distance is fitted by training the Bi-LSTM network incorporating the attention mechanism. Finally, in response to the issue that a small amount of fault data in practical engineering is difficult to support the amount of data required for deep learning, a transfer learning method is used to locate the fault in the target domain. A small sample test of the target domain is carried out using the migration learning method. The experimental results show that the proposed method has high localization accuracy and good resistance to over-resistance and noise; compared with the traditional network training, the localization error based on migration learning is smaller, and the network convergence effect is better.