The coach seats are, however, turned.

Autos are always on the rear facing the opposite direction of travel.

Before reclining seats, the backs flipped, the so called "walkover" seats.

Rotating or flipping seats are used to my personal knowledge also in Taiwan, Japan, and Korea. Peaople in these places all expect to be seated facing the direction of travel.

Generally in Europe and other places following European practices the seats are fixed so that half the seats face backward. In Malaysia the coach seats face the nearest end of the car.

One of the controversies in Korea with their new high speed line is that the French designed coaches have fixed seats so that half of the people end of riding backwards.

In Britain most cars have a mixture of forward-facing, rear-facing, and table seats. Typically there would be 4-6 tables per car and the rest equally divided between forward and rear airline-style seats.

My first trip on KTM was in 1992, second class coach Singapore to Kuala Lumpur afternoon train. In that case the seats each faced the near end and were back to back at the middle of the car.

Was working in Singapore for a few months in 1998 and rode trains up into Malaysia on a few occasions. I do not really recall the set up at that time. My trips were about half sleeper, half coach.

OK, I know we are getting off topic, since the topic is "Amtrak" but just so happened to have been given the following earlier today. Appears to be from a web site, but only have it on paper. Following is copied except I have added coversion from the quoted NTD amounts to US$:

KTX May Succumb to Reverse Direction Seat Complaint

KTX seat occupation rate of May was disappointing 64%, just 4% increase from opening month of April. KR, Korea Railway came to believe that reverse-direction-seat is the major reason. KR at last admitted their mistake to put in 20% more seats (by having those fixed) but ended up losing much more pasengers. KR is looking into a plan to replace the seats with huge budget of 3.6 billion NYD equivalent. (US$3,200,000) Furthermore, because of unique structure of KTX train, not allowing detachment of individual cars, they can work on only one train set per month. This menas it will take 4 years to complete the job. At present, 404 seats per train (43% of 935 seats) are in reverse direction. One young lady sent her embarrassing trip experience to KR internet bulletin board. She was seated opposite to a young man, a stranger. After two hours of leg crouching (to avoid accidental knee-touch) and looking away, both of them had stiff neck and cramp legs upon arrival. This concern had been raised during the train order stage. Looks like several KR people, who had understimated the concern at the time, have to worry about their rice bowl. (3-June-2004)

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A few comments: I copied the item word for word. The original language of the author appears to be other than English. The trains are articulated train sets with the trucks (bogies) shared between adjacent coaches. (Was not this treid in the US and determined to be a bad idea in the 1930's.) The trains do not turn, but simply reverse directions at each end. Do not know how the backward facing seats could be 43% of the total unless 14% of the seating faces sideways.