2.37 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=676m ahead. 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 case in which a collision is just avoided and not quite avoided.
This java applet will let you explore this problem for a variety of initial conditions. It was originally created with Stella and converted to java using Stella2java. The high-speed train is train 1 and the locomotive is train 2.