Prague to Berlin --confused about train ticket

I think you probably did not check the little box. Even if you had, that route has "no diagram available," but you would have a car/wagon number and seat/platz number on your ticket. You cannot buy seat reservations separately on the DB site for this international route, so you will have to buy it at a train station or travel agency, if you want it. Seat reservations are optional and you do have a fair chance of finding seats together in 1st class even without a reservation.

Thank you, Laura. I was afraid I'd missed the check box because as I was fussing with the Berlin/Cologne reservation variations I realized that the system allowed you to choose seats but not check the box and then you'd get to pricing/ready to finish and sometimes I had seat numbers and sometimes I didn't. I guess I'll go ahead and pay the 15 euros or whatever the penalty is to cancel those tickets and start over (actually I guess I'd better be sure to get new tickets with seats before cancelling the old tickets). Otherwise I'll be worrying about the seats for the next six weeks.

So for anyone reading, watch for that darn tick box! If I were running the world the options for the type of compartments and whether you wanted to sit facing or side by side either wouldn't show up at all unless you ticked the seat reservation box or you wouldn't be allowed to choose seats and then proceed without a message popping up saying the seats weren't reserved for you unless you agreed to the extra 9 euro seat assignment fee. I was so proud of myself for making all the reservations, but now I'm kicking myself for managing to mess up our second train trip.

OK, with much trepidation and my husband sitting nearby, I cancelled the unassigned seat reser. and re-booked. The hardest thing was finding the page in DB that showed last week's reservation. Then there was a button to click for semi-simultaneously booking new and cancelling old, which I liked. By then I was able to tell from the price on the old ticket that I had indeed neglected to tick the box agreeing to the 9 euro fee for a seat assignment. It got a little scary when I got to the screen that said the seats weren't going to be shown until I actually made the reservation. Hmmm, now I'm getting nervous. So what could I do but proceed to the next screen which said the old reservation was cancelled, but the new couldn't be booked for the seats I requested. By then I was sweating, but there was nothing to do except accept at that point. So we ended up with a window and an aisle, rather than 2 windows facing each other over a table. I can't be sure seat 73 & 75 are side by side, but at least they are in hailing distance.

So I cost myself some money, but now I can rest easy. And considering that a table seat wasn't available seven weeks before the travel will take place, I'm very happy to have taken care of this now so that we aren't sitting apart from each other. I'm hoping that this is the worst snag on our trip and that all goes smoothly from here!

I assume you picked the open coach seating rather than a compartment.

First class seating is three across, with 1 seat on one side of the aisle and 2 seats on the other side. I think you will find that seat 71 is on the single seat side, and 73 and 75 are beside on the other side of the aisly. If it turns out that the aisle is between seats 73 and 75, you might be able to get the person in 71 to swap with 75.

Just found a map of seat numbers for an EC, here. Looks like there aren't many seats facing seats sets in any coach, but seats 73 & 75 are next to each other without facing seats.

Thank you, Lee!