CrossCountry seat selector - how to find it?

[alistairlees]

I don't ever seem to be able to get the CrossCountry seat selector to appear. I tried York to Darlington, York to Sheffield and Sheffield to Bristol TM, all for Tuesday morning next week, and solely on CrossCountry services, but was never offered the option to select my seat. Has it been disabled, or am I just overlooking something obvious?

 

[Paul Kelly]

I don't think it has been working for a while? My random guess was that it was "hard-coded" to use the full capacity seat layout, rather than taking a dynamic seat layout from NRS/RARS2, and it was seen as too much work to update it. Totally a guess though. You can still choose your seats on CrossCountry services on TrainSplit but a "feature" of the new RARS2 system means that all the seats are shown as pointing in the same direction, which makes it very hard to orient yourself in each carriage.

 

[alistairlees]

Thanks Paul. I just heard from CrossCountry that it's switched off because it wouldn't work well with social distancing.