Upvote:6
For Germany it is possible to select specific seats with the following conditions:
The reason for the difference in the IC trains is, that the seatmaps for older IC trains are available for the service agents on the phone or at the Reisezentrum, but not yet on the website, due to the differences in the seatmaps.
Exceptions are here, if there is e.g. a replacement train running instead of a scheduled one. Then it could be, that the seatmap is not available online. But that's only in rare cases.