Operator: EMR
Headcode: 1F82
Route: STP-EMD
Class: 1st Class
Seat: D63
Date: Wednesday 18th March 2026
Having arrived back at Heathrow from my trip to Barcelona and Andorra, a last-minute change of plans saw me heading to the East Midlands rather than back home to Peterborough and as such I headed from the airport to St Pancras rather than Kings Cross. This did give me the opportunity to finally try out one of EMR’s new Hitachi class 810 ‘Auroras’, a train that’s introduction into service has been beset by delays and has more recently resulted in strike action by unions over safety concerns. However the Auroras are the future of the Midland Mainline inter-city fleet, so what is all the fuss about?
After a speedrun across London, I arrived at St Pancras less than 90 minutes after my aircraft had landed at Heathrow and just a few minutes before the departure of EMR’s 2132 service to Sheffield. Thankfully boarding had only just started when I arrived and so I was able to quickly get onboard and grab a seat in coach D. Somehow, despite boarding starting only a few minutes earlier, we still managed to depart on time at 2132. Whilst my late arrival at the station wouldn’t have given me time to visit it anyway, it is worth noting that EMR have removed its 1st Class lounges from the few stations, including St Pancras, that had them and no longer provide any pre-journey offering for 1st Class.
The class 810 Aurora is EMR’s version of Hitachi’s ‘A-train’ and so a cousin of the 80Xs that are in service across the country with Avanti, GWR, Hull Trains, LNER, Lumo and TPE. Whilst some of the other classes of A-train vary in length, all the 33 class 810s being built for EMR are formed of five coaches, with three and a half coaches of standard class seating, two half coaches of 1st class along with a kitchen. 1st class is laid out in the usual 1-2 configuration, although it did seem that they had slightly larger seats than onboard the Auroras’ cousins with other operators. The seats had nice purple and beige upholstery, adding some colour to interior, and all seats had both a USB-A socket and a standard plug socket.
The interior of 1st Class also had decent sized overhead racks, that could easily fit most cases, with the seats also having coat hooks but no reading lights. Of course, there is also modern passenger information systems with info screens at the bulk heads that rotate through a map, journey information and info on how full the train is. There are also more basic dot matrix (or modern equivalent) screens above the doors running through the usual list of the destination of the service, intermediate stations and the obligatory “See it, say it, sorted!”. It was with these I noticed the first ‘bug’ in the new trains, with one of these dot matrix’s glitching and not displaying the required info.
Not long after departure, as we were still making our way through the north London suburbs, the onboard crew came through with an initial offering of refreshments which included a good choice of non-alcoholic drinks along with biscuits and crisps. Alcoholic drinks are also available, however you do have to pay extra for these unlike on most inter-city operators. Shortly after this the crew came back round offering a choice of cream tea or ploughman’s snack boxes, and I went for the former, deciding to have something sweet to round off my day. Inside the box was a single scone with a small pot of cream and a sachet of jam, along with a clotted cream shortbread finger and I was pleasantly surprised as despite being pre-packaged, the scone seemed quite fresh. All in all, it was pretty tasty, although quite a small offering from EMR on one of their flagship routes.
The journey itself was comfortable and non-eventful, with it being just over an 80-minute run from St Pancras to East Midlands Parkway, with intermediate stops at Leicester and Loughborough. With it being dark outside there was nothing to see apart from the lights of stations and, having had a long day that had started in Barcelona, I just sat and doomscrolled once I’d finished my snack box. After the initial two walk throughs of 1st class, the crew seemingly didn’t want to bother anyone as there were no further drinks offered during the journey north. Unfortunately, despite our on-time departure from St Pancras, we did lose some time somewhere as we arrived into a deserted East Midlands Parkway at 2259, four minutes late.
Obviously from a passenger perspective it is hard to see if there are genuine safety concerns with the Auroras, however I ended this standalone journey of a positive impression of them. They were smooth and comfortable, and a lot quieter than the class 222s they replace, although I do think that EMR need to take another look at their 1st Class offering on these inter-city routes. It wasn’t too many years ago that they had lounges at major stations, offered proper cooked breakfasts on some trains and included alcoholic drinks in the base offering. All in all, the Auroras offer a decent ‘hard product’ in 1st Class, but EMR’s offering is let down by the ‘soft product’ and off the train. However, this journey was comfortable, quiet and most importantly got me to my destination safely and almost on time.
Lounge 0*
Seat/Facilities 4*
Food 3*
Service 4*
Punctuality 5*
Overall Rating 16/25 (read about my rating system here!)
Flights & Times 