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Cadbury Crunchie Tour KA 945

Back in 1993, one of the preserved KA’s was used as the motive power for a nationwide train tour to promote the famous Cadbury Crunchie Bar. That engine was KA 945, an engine that was built in 1939. The tour visited just about every part of the New Zealand Rail network; it started in Auckland and even went as far south as Invercargill.

Incidentally there was an old - and very stupid - television advertisement for the Crunchie Bar, that was filmed on a steam-hauled passenger train. Except this train wasn’t the tour hauled by KA 945, but rather the heritage ‘Kingston Flyer’ down near Lake Wakatipu. The locomotive that appears in the advertisement is not a KA, but rather an AB class 4-6-2, although the people who made the ad thought it a brilliant idea to mix the Kingston Flyer footage in with clips of old American 4-4-0’s, because those look exactly the same as the AB and no-one will ever notice that they’re completely different locomotives.

As for the engine that hauled the Crunchie Tour - KA 945 - she was withdrawn for overhaul just two years after the tour ended. That overhaul is still going on 26 years later.