Some places are forever doomed to obscurity. Dudley is quite simply a place of which many English people know too little — despite the zoo that we mention in our main feature. Germany has many equivalents in the Ruhr region which, like the Black Country around Dudley in England, is a former coal mining area. In the Ruhr area, we find the town of Herten rather interesting, though we would wager that few of our Berlin neighbours have ever heard of Herten. It is a town that rarely features in the news. Herten has no football team of great standing, and this community of sixty thousand souls does not even have a railway station — the largest place anywhere in Germany served by not a single passenger train. This is quite an achievement in a country criss-crossed by rail routes.