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I have purchased an AB zone Berlin 7 day transport ticket and validated it on Sunday 17th April so hopefully it will be valid until Sunday 24th.

I validated the ticket at about 10:00am so I guess 1000 is the time I validated? But what are the numbers 15 and 6 and letters 'So' correspond to? How (if checked by a guard) can they tell if the ticket is valid? And how can I as a customer tell when it is validated to?

Ticket

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    I am not sure but it might be the week number. (The Dutch system used to use week numbers and we are around that time of the year.)
    – Willeke ♦
    Apr 22, 2016 at 13:37
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    So = Sonntag, presumably. @Willeke suggestion of week number makese sense. You can see that you validated it 6 minutes after buying too - where it says 170416 0954 would appear to be DDMMYY HHNN of time of purcfhase/printing.
    – CMaster
    Apr 22, 2016 at 13:38
  • Good shout. It could be week number. Any references for that? The ticket machines must be out of sync with the validate machines as it was certainly instant after purchase that I validated and not 6 minutes! :P
    – medina
    Apr 22, 2016 at 13:46
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    Validation machines are allowed to run fast, as that gives the customer more time on his ticket, they are not allowed to run slow, as that would eat into the time you get. So if in doubt, the technicians will give it a few extra minutes. The 'best' I have seen were routinely 30 minutes fast.
    – Willeke ♦
    Apr 22, 2016 at 13:48
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    Also, in some systems (I don't know about Berlin) the validation machines can only stamp "00", "15", "30", or "45" for the minutes-past-the-hour -- so even if its clock runs impeccably, it will round up to the next quarter of an hour.
    – hmakholm left over Monica
    Apr 22, 2016 at 14:02

2 Answers 2

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You can find a detailed description of the stamp content on this page (in German).

The calendar week and last digit of year assumptions in the comments are correct. Your ticket was stamped 10:00 on the Sunday (So) of calendar week 15 (April 11th to 17th) in the year 2016 by ticket validator number 5 on U-Bahnhof (subway station) Schönleinstraße.

The weekly ticket is valid for seven calendar days (including the day it was stamped), so your ticket is valid through Saturday 23rd of April.

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7-Tage-Karten VBB-Umweltkarte werden an jedermann ausgegeben und sind übertragbar. Sie gelten innerhalb der auf ihnen angegebenen Flächenzonen für sieben aufeinanderfolgende Kalendertage. Ihre Gültigkeit beginnt am ersten aufgedruckten Kalendertag 00:00 Uhr und endet am siebenten Kalendertag um 24:00 Uhr.

http://www.s-bahn-berlin.de/aboundtickets/7_tage_karte.htm

I will refrain from a full translation. The important part is that it's valid starting from 00:00 of the day of validation. Thus your ticket is valid until the end of Saturday.

Coming from the Munich area the stamp itself is kind of confusing to me but a short google search yields that indeed as the comments suggest, the information is time, weekday, week number, year.

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