Solution: 1*
Monday, 02 May 2011 18:51

The puzzle imitates SaarVV's bus time tables, specifically the one of line 138. One can observe that there are as many hours as there are bus stops. The minutes are weird: there's no regular schedule during the day and the times are not spread evenly within an hour but tend to be collocated for each hour. And why there are buses after the midnight on Mon-Fri when there's no bus in the evening?

The insight is to pick letters from each bus stop name by the "corresponding" hour of the day. However, the indexes are offset in addition. If one tries to subtract the hour from each minute, one decodes WORKS but then nothing reasonable comes out. Let's look at 20:42 - there is no 22 letters in "Römerkastell"... What about subtracting the number of minutes required to travel there from Dudoplatz? 42-30=12, which is the last letter in the word.

So each 'hour' corresponds to one bus stop. The 'minutes' pick letters from the bus stop names. This gives us WORKS, VENTILATION TOWER UNI SWIMMINGPOOL.