On the way to Aguas Calientes from Cusco, we took the Vista Dome train and to our disappointment the seats that we had were facing the other set of seats. So four of us were facing each other with very little leg room, at least we felt lucky to be facing forward as the train was moving as the other couple who we didn't know had to ride facing backwards the whole trip up. But there was only one other pair of seats facing that way and I wondered why we had been so unfortunate to get those seat when all the others were facing forward and just two seats together. Well, I learned a valuable lesson on the return trip......I discovered that all of the seats are reversable, they flip both ways! So if you are a family of 4, you can switch the seats forward or back to face each other or if you are just 2 persons then you face all forward, just by a simple lever on the side of the seat. Too bad I didn't notice this on the way up to AC, it would have given us all alot more leg room and the other couple could have enjoyed facing forward. Hope this info will help others. And as far as the debate of VistaDome vs Backpacker train, the seats are ALOT more comfortable on the VistaDome and we really enjoyed looking at the Andes Mts. through the sky windows on top of the VistaDome. So IMO the VistaDome, hands down wins!

Wow -- thanks for sharing that! It would really make me motion sick to ride backwards the whole way and I probably would never notice that the direction of the seatback could be switched.

Glad to know also that the Vistadome was a good choice.

This is a fantastic post! Thank you so much for sharing!!!

Thanks for the tip - it's good information to have.

That is helpful to know. With older cars, I'm not surprised but not sure I would have found it.

Reminds me. Don't know if you've ridden the Eurostar yet, but most of their cars have half the seats facing backwards (so they don't have to turn the train around at terminals). First time we took it, yep we got the backward facing seats. Try that at 300 km/186 mph!! Made a lot of trips to the cafe car just to get up.