When a high-speed passenger train traveling at 161 km/h rounds a bend, the engineer is shocked to see that a locomotive has improperly entered onto the track from a siding and is a distance `D=676` m ahead ( Fig. 2-20). The locomotive is moving at 29.0 km/h. The engineer of the high-speed train immediately applies the brakes . (a) What must be the magnitude of the resulting constant deceleration if a collision is to be just avoided ? (b) Assume that the engineer is at `x=0` when , at `t=0`, he first spots the locomotive. Sketch `x(t)` curves for the locomotive and high-speed train for the cases in which a collision is just avoided and is not quite avoided.

Answer

(a) `-0.994 m//s^(4)`