Originally Posted by serpens

OP here. The luggage was a non-event. I carried the luggage and no one batted an eye, as had always been the case in the past. (FWIW, after my original post, Amtrak sent a second email warning me again of the luggage policy.)

On a completely unrelated issue (except that it was the same train trip), there was a sleeper substituting for a coach. More explicitly, on an Empire Builder, the car immediately behind the diner (the first car one would enter when walking to the lounge car) was a sleeper. At one meal, I sat with a passenger who, as a coach passenger, had been seated in a roomette. He said it was a tight space for sharing with a stranger.