The Murg Valley Railway (German: Murgtalbahn) is a 58 kilometre long railway line in the Northern Black Forest in Germany, that links Rastatt and Freudenstadt. It was opened in stages from 1868 to 1928 being built outwards from both Rastatt and Freudenstadt. The route through the narrow Murg Valley required the construction of numerous tunnels and bridges. The section between the stations of Baiersbronn and Freudenstadt Stadt is a steep ramp which is why it had to be operated until 1926 as a rack railway. Even today it can only be worked by vehicles that have the required approval.

After the occasional long-distance passenger services had been withdrawn in the 1990s, the Murg Valley Railway was integrated into the network of the Karlsruhe Stadtbahn between 2002 and 2004. Since then it has been operated by Albtal-Verkehrs-Gesellschaft (AVG), using their fleet of tram-trains. At Freudenstadt, these meet the services of the Ortenau S-Bahn (OSB), operating over the Kinzig Valley Railway to Offenburg.

Hans Bayer, known by the pseudonym Thaddäus Troll, (18 March 1914 – 5 July 1980) was a German journalist and writer and one of the most prominent modern poets in the Swabian German dialect. In his later years he was also an active campaigner for libraries and for support, pension rights and fair publishing contracts for writers. He was born in Bad-Cannstatt, a suburb of Stuttgart and committed suicide there at the age of 66. The literary award, Thaddäus-Troll-Preis, is named in his honour. His family had a soap-making business in the town. After he finished his secondary education at the Johannes-Kepler-Gymnasium, he worked briefly as a volunteer at a newspaper in Cannstatt. He then studied German, art history, comparative literature, theater, and journalism at the universities of Tübingen, Munich, Halle, and Leipzig, receiving his doctorate in 1938 from Leipzig University.