Rails 2 public folder: No route matches assets - ruby-on-rails

Question

I am working on a legacy Ruby on Rails application which is running under Ruby 1.9 and Rails 2.3.18.
I am serving the application through Apache with Passenger.
I am getting errors in the production.log which indicate that there is something wrong with how Rails or the web server is treating the public folder, e.g.
ActionController::RoutingError (No route matches "/javascripts/picnet.table.filter.min.js" with {:method=>:get})
All the required assets which are causing the errors are in the application public folder. Note that this is under Rails 2 not Rails 3 or 4.
My Apache host entry for the application looks like this:
<VirtualHost 127.0.0.1:443>
SSLEngine on
SSLProtocol all -SSLv2
SSLCipherSuite HIGH:MEDIUM:!aNULL:!MD5
SSLCertificateFile "/Users/evanbrown/Documents/apache-keys/server.crt"
SSLCertificateKeyFile "/Users/evanbrown/Documents/apache-keys/server.key"
ServerAdmin me#localhost
DocumentRoot "/Users/evanbrown/Documents/bl-app/public"
ServerName blapp.localhost
ServerAlias blapp.localhost
ErrorLog "/private/var/log/apache2/localhost-error.log"
PassengerRuby "/Users/evanbrown/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.3-p547#rails2/wrappers/ruby"
CustomLog "/private/var/log/apache2/localhost-access.log" common
<Directory "/Users/evanbrown/Documents/bl-app/public">
Options FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride None
Order allow,deny
Allow from all
Options -MultiViews
PassengerAppEnv production
</Directory>
</VirtualHost>
The application is being served correctly by Passenger but since all the stylesheets and Javascripts in the public folder are causing routing errors, the output is all wrong.
I have read lots of posts that state that a misconfigured config.serve_static_assets can cause these problems but this seems to be for Rails 3 only as there is no option serve_static_assets under config in Rails 2.
My public folder is owned by the Apache user and group, which I understand is _www:_www under OS X.
-rwxrwxrwx 1 _www _www 947 5 Nov 11:20 404.html
-rwxrwxrwx 1 _www _www 930 5 Nov 11:20 422.html
-rwxrwxrwx 1 _www _www 948 5 Nov 11:20 500.html
-rwxrwxrwx 1 _www _www 0 5 Nov 11:20 favicon.ico
-rwxrwxrwx 1 _www _www 14571 5 Nov 11:20 favicon.png
drwxrwxrwx 4 _www _www 136 5 Nov 11:20 images
drwxrwxrwx 11 _www _www 374 5 Nov 11:20 javascripts
-rwxrwxrwx 1 _www _www 204 5 Nov 11:20 robots.txt
drwxrwxrwx 4 _www _www 136 5 Nov 11:20 stylesheets
Can anyone help me to find out what the solution to this problem is? Many thanks for your help.