Audley End Miniature Railway is an independently run visitor attraction in north Essex. Open from March to Christmas Eve, it’s enjoyed by 140,000 visitors a year. It employs 26 full-time staff and up to 200 at peak times. Keeping this 60-year-old business growing are Emma Banks, Head of Marketing & Creative, and Emily Caton, Head of Operations.
“Christmas is huge for us. We attract over a third of our annual visitors in just five weeks. We love bringing the magic of Christmas to life for children. We invest a lot, but the return is what allows us to drive the business forward and invest in new projects for year-round sales.”
Procuring essentials like wood chip through AF means the Audley End team can focus on their customer experience
“We’ve been a Member of AF since 2018. We’re not a farming business but there are lots of elements of our site for which we're able to tap into AF.
“We use AF for all our plant & machinery hire. We call up and usually Kelvin helps us find the best price on equipment we need like spider lifts, small tractors or garden tractors.
“We buy wood chip through AF and other ground materials. We buy all our fuel through AF. Our trains are diesel and a lot of our equipment on site uses diesel, including our generators that we hire in for Christmas. AF organise the deliveries at a time of day which suits our site and opening hours.
“We also ordered small straw bales through AF. There was a shortage and we needed them for our Halloween straw maze. A lovely farmer came from Colchester with a huge trailer, got it through our tiny gateway and placed all the bales exactly where we needed them. He was so helpful, and we gave him a cup of tea of course!”
“Pre joining AF we had a guy pretty much fulltime on screens trawling the internet for what we needed. If it took 4 hours to save £5, he’d do it! But we see how inefficient that was.”
“All our managers have an AF Charge Card - eight in total! They’re handy for day-to-day purchases that don't need to go through a huge approval process or invoice. We use them on Amazon or for online purchasing, and in shops. They’ve got a set spend limit. And if we need an increase we speak to AF’s Steph Chapman, she's great.
“We put all our ad campaigns on Facebook and Instagram through our AF Charge Card. It's super easy - payment goes through straight away and we keep the receipts and consolidate them at the end of the month for finance.
“Our colleague Will, who orders our fuel, has recently started using AF Online and finds it really useful because no matter which day of the week or what time, he can order fuel at the best rate.”
“Until our AF Account Manager Gemma du Feu sat down with us and explained all AF could do for us, we were not making the most of our membership. We are now and our spend with AF is up 20%.”
“Our owner, Amanda Murray, is very creative. We have lots of new projects from January: a new electric ‘steam’ train; a new bespoke role-play village with five wooden houses for imaginative play for toddlers; a rebrand with new name and logo for 2026 to better reflect all we offer; track repairs and rerouting (we’ll be ordering ballast and machinery through AF) and new offices - again needing machinery and aggregates.
“The market is always changing - what families engage with, trends, spending habits, the financial climate. We constantly evolve to keep up and ensure what we offer is relevant and priced correctly. At the core of our ethos is nature - using real materials, being rustic, getting people outside, in fresh air and away from screens.”
140,000 visitors a year, mostly families with children, enjoy Audley End Miniature Railway
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