forceType not working..

I'm trying to configure apache to surrender processing to a php script if the url contains a given directory.

Adding this

<Location /local>
ForceType application/x-httpd-php
</Location>

to httpd.conf tells apache to treat a file called "local" as a php script.

Hence, http://mydomainName.com/local/sub/dir/

should cause apache to call the file "local", which contains php scripts.

Everything works well for me, if I call
http://mydomainName.com/local

But if I try
http://mydomainName.com/local/
or
http://mydomainName.com/local/sub/
or
http://mydomainName.com/local/sub/dir/

basically, anything in front of
http://mydomainName.com/local

I get

Object not found!
The requested URL was not found on this server. If you entered the URL manually please check your spelling and try again.
Error 404

Does anybody know why this is happening?

The article that discusses this is:

http://www.devarticles.com/c/a/Apache/Using-ForceType-For-Nicer-Page-URLs/

My setup:
Apache/2.0.40
RedHat 9
PHP 4.2.2