I see what you did here!!
If you are interested there is a clip within this awful podcast (I apologize in advance for the language - never watched it and have no earthly idea why so many “podcasters” think gratuitous cursing is a good thing) but here is an engineer (allegedly) talking about what happened and he makes some very valid points that are in line with my reasoning -
The comments by the engineer start around 3:20 and its very short (couple of minutes) but it details why these longer trains are harder to manage. Keep in mind that the railroad is currently trying to get rid of the second employee on the trains to save money so the union opposes this and that is mostly what the “strike” was/is about.