Great Western Coffee Shop

......I wonder if this will spread to more TOCs, and how it will be enforced?

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12774451/lner-trains-ryanair-style-rail-passenger-luggage-limit.html

As mentioned in the article, conditions of carriage have stated this limit for over ten years. 

At best a helpful deterrent and might help put a few people off carrying multiple suitcases, but actual enforcement will be very rare IMHO.  After all this is a limit per passenger and ‘one large suitcase, a carry-on bag and a small hand bag’ should be all an individual should ever be able to sensibly manage anyway.

A poster at the station is a bit late, and is I suspect mainly to allow staff to point at it when someone with an unfeasibly large amount of luggage (the solo traveller you occasionally see with a trolley piled high with large cases) causes a problem and demands to know where it says there's a limit. The 3 items reference does come from the NR Conditions of Travel, but the maximum size is only associated with furniture(!) in those conditions so LNER are stretching a point. I was though pleasantly surprised to find that what I regard as a large rucsac I often use for a week away is anyway comfortably within the dimensions, and if I pushed NR/LNER's restrictions to the limit I'd probably struggle to carry it all myself.  The rules also aren't true airline style as there is no weight limit.

Leaving that aside, thanks mostly to the DfT's influence many modern trains really do lack sufficent, well-designed luggage space (not a guard's van though - they would take too long to load/unload and there are all sorts of security/theft issues).  One side-effect of the move to "airline" style seats is the loss of luggage space close to where you're sitting between the seat backs.

There's only a passing reference in the article to open access operator Lumo, which runs on the same route and really does have an unreasonably small luggage limit which means many people would struggle to take enough for more than a long weekend away.  They also don't have luggage racks at all in some carriages.  They're the ones the Mail should be having a dig at.

It is a good idea I think and as you say the "limit" is a reasonable one - you do wonder how anyone could physically carry much more than that anyway! (Although having accompanied my wife on her shopping trips to act as a mule, I've had a fair bit of practice!)  :)

A comparison between LNER and Ryanair is nonsensical; every time we have used LNER they have deposited us in the middle of the city or town to which we were travelling rather than 20-30 miles away near a local bus stop!  ;D