In a strong field, one of the wackiest additions to the Batman comics of the 1950s was the Bat-Train, a locomotive built and paid for by local governments to provide Batman and Robin with an easy way to travel across the country and give speeches about fighting crime. Although you might think that such an extravagant creation would have remained firmly rooted in the ’50s, it’s actually made a surprising comeback recently.
Batman has been around for nearly a century, and during that time he has become one of the most recognizable and enduring pop culture figures in history. Nowadays, we all know him as a lonely, brooding avenger haunted by his tragic past. But it is only through the work of comic book artists such as Neal Adams and Frank Miller, and filmmakers such as Tim Burton and Christopher Nolan, that the general public recognizes the Dark Knight as such.
Before the 1980s, the character was known as a much lighter character, largely thanks to the 1960s television series starring Adam West. But it’s not just ABC’s “Batman” that has greenlit the Dark Knight. In the 1950s and 1960s, comic books took the “strange figure of darkness” of Bob Kane and Bill Finger and made him much more of a boy scout who frequently fought fantastical enemies.
That’s not to say it was necessarily a bad thing. Some of the most bizarre Silver Age Batman villains are absolutely brilliant in their own right and represent a delightfully wacky period in Caped Crusader history. It wasn’t just the thieves either. Batman comics of the ’50s introduced all kinds of wacky concepts, from Ace the Bat-Hound in 1955’s “Batman” #92 to the tiny, magical Bat-Mite in 1959’s “Detective Comics” #267. Then there was a time when local governments built their own Batman and Robin train sets.
The Bat-Train was one of the craziest creations in the 1950s Batman comics.
Some of the best Batman comics have grown to crazy proportions. The “Absolute Batman” series, for example, makes major changes to the character’s history and has received much praise. Then there’s the Bat version of the “Frankenstein” story, which is actually surprisingly good. The Bat-Train, however, was one of the less successful examples of creators gone rogue.
Introduced in 1955’s “Batman” #95 (by Bill Finger and Sheldon Moldoff), the Bat-Train appeared in a story of the same name in which the United States police department encourages Batman to travel the country and give lectures on crime-fighting and deterrence. Rather than expecting him to embark on a roadtrip in the Batmobile, the cops manage to convince their various towns to foot the bill for a special Bat-Train, which essentially served as a Batcave on wheels for the Dark Knight and Boy Wonder. Yes, in the world of Batman, public money was used to build one of the most useless creations in all of comic book history.
Naturally, the creation of a giant Bat-Train attracts the attention of opportunistic criminals, who attempt to steal the train as it travels across the country. Of course, the Dynamic Duo manages to stop them and even uses the defeated villains as examples in their lectures. It all made for a strange story that seemed as far-fetched as many other tales of the era, but without any fantastical villains. This wasn’t the last we heard of the Bat-Train either, as the long-forgotten locomotive was revisited in 2020’s “Batman” #92, in which Deathstroke remarks, “You’ve got to be kidding me.” A Bat Train? only for Batman to respond, “Keep going.”
