I know... Another question about how to know what seats face forward on a train. I've read what I could find, but still not clear to me.
I'll be going from Munich to Nuremberg on 3/19 in the afternoon, probably first class. I really would like to reserve a seat facing forward. Or can I just switch seats if I'm facing the wrong way?
Thanks for any help.
If the train is not filled up and the digital display of a seat shows that it is not reserved for the leg you want to travel (example picture) you are allowed to change seats.
During booking seat reservation you will normally find an arrow below or above the waggon schemes (example) which indicates the planned travel direction ("Fahrtrichtung").
Thanks. I'm looking at the seat reservation step and don't see any arrow. Desktop & mobile. Maybe I'm looking in the wrong spot?
I don't see it either, so you are not alone. Sometimes the trains will switch directions further down the line when they call at a terminal station like Frankfurt or Stuttgart or Leipzig. My wife does not like riding "backwards" either, so we try to get seats across a table so we can switch easily if the direction of travel is not to her liking.
Sometimes they do not know which direction a train will be facing, and sometimes a train ends up travelling the other way round than it was planned, and your forward facing seat becomes backward facing.
The best solution is to learn not to care about this. The reason that trains have half the seats facing one way and half the other is that the vast majority of people doesn't care. Trains do not move the same way cars do, so motion sickness is not an issue, except maybe psychological.
ICE is only 1:06 or so.
Unfortunately, there is no easy way to find out the direction of travel and seating on the DB website. However, there are some meta-pages that make this possible with some effort. The easiest to use is fernbahn.de.
note your train number from the DB app
go to https://www.grahnert.de/fernbahn/reihung/reih0043.html. In the upper right corner, set the language to English.
search for your train number, let's say ICE 622, departing Munich 14:47.
the route of the train will be indicated as follows: <= Munich-Frankfurt / Frankfurt- Dortmund => , i.e. the train changes direction in Frankfurt
So for your leg to Nuremberg applies: left = front. Now click on a carriage number, say 38. The seating map pops up with seat symbols where you can recognize the backrest. This means that in this carriage you will travel backwards in all seats with the numbers from 11 to 55, forwards in all seats from 56 to 85, etc.
now you can select one of the seats in the DB app
But ... What you see is the scheduled carriage sequence. It's not uncommon for trains to deviate from this for technical reasons (it's a popular DB game to keep its customers happy: announcing two minutes before departure that "the train is running with the reverse carriage order today").
So I wouldn't worry about the whole thing. With three ICE trains per hour between 14:00 and 15:00, it is unlikely that even one of the 1st class coaches will be full (the forecast for all three trains on March 19 is "low occupancy"). So just get on and occupy a free seat in the direction of travel.
Thanks everyone. @sla019 , your information is very helpful.
