One Of Batman's Wackiest Vehicles Was Paid For By Local Governments

In a strong field, one of the wackiest additions to 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 cross-country and give speeches about crime-fighting. While you might think such an outlandish creation stayed firmly in the '50s, it actually made a return surprisingly recently.

Batman has been around for almost a century, and during that time has become one of the most recognizable and enduring pop culture figures in history. Nowadays, we're all familiar with him as a brooding lone avenger haunted by his tragic past. But it's only thanks to the work of comic book artists such as Neal Adams and Frank Miller, and filmmakers such as Tim Burton and Christopher Nolan, that mass audiences recognize the Dark Knight as such.

Before the 1980s, the character was known as a much more lighthearted figure, thanks in large part to the 1960s Adam West-starring TV series. But it wasn't just ABC's "Batman" that lightened up the Dark Knight. In the 1950s and '60s, the comics took Bob Kane and Bill Finger's "weird figure of the dark" and made him into much more of a Boy Scout who would frequently battle fantastical foes.

That's not to say this 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 time in the Caped Crusader's history. It wasn't just the rogues, either. Batman comics of the '50s introduced all sorts of zany concepts, from Ace the Bat-Hound in 1955's "Batman" #92 to the magical, minuscule Bat-Mite in 1959's "Detective Comics" #267. Then, there was the time local governments built Batman and Robin their own train.

Some of the best Batman comics have taken wild swings. The "Absolute Batman" series, for instance, makes major changes to the character's story and has been met with widespread 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 going 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 police departments across the U.S encourage Batman to travel the country and deliver lectures on crime-fighting and deterrence. Rather than expecting him to embark on a roadtrip in the Batmobile, however, the cops manage to convince their various cities 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 unnecessary creations in all of comic book history.

Naturally, the creation of a giant Bat-Train catches the attention of opportunistic criminals, who attempt to steal from the train as it travels the country. Of course, the Dynamic Duo manage to stop them and even use the defeated villains as examples in their lectures. All of which made for a strange story that came across as just as wacky as many other tales from the era, but without any fantastical villains. This wasn't the last time we heard of the Bat-Train, either, as the long-forgotten locomotive was seen again in "Batman" #92 from 2020, wherein Deathstroke remarks, "You're kidding me. A Bat-Train?" only for Batman to respond, "Just get on."