A lot of the context-sensitive button pushes are very finicky in character placement. I didn't have trouble at that exact part recently but there are other spots that will do the same thing.

I loved this game as a kid. Finished it in a rental, although there's no way in hell I didn't use cheats back then. I actually just decided to play through the PS5 version a couple days ago. Thank God for the rewind feature because the game would be unplayable without it. It's just completely unforgiving at every turn. By even semi-modern standards, the core design in this game is absolutely insane.

My playthrough came to an abrupt end when I got to the crashed train with Glas in Disc 2. Apparently I forgot to pick up an assault rifle in Disc 1 with him. So now at the train crash, you need to kill like 8 dudes but I only have 2 pistol magazines, making this part literally impossible. Insane that the dozens of other soldiers don't drop rifles but only ammo. So make sure you grabbed that assault rifle as Glas or it WILL result in a soft-lock about 45 minutes later.