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I could literally bike across the Great Plains faster than a train and save enough money to buy a new bike. You first have to take the train to California, then to Oregon, and back halfway across the country.
this post was submitted on 15 Jan 2026
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traingang
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Your best bet would I think be the Zephyr to Osceola, Iowa. Then you can get a bus (once a day) to Des Moines, from which there is a bus to Minneapolis twice a day.
Or take the Zephyr all the way to Chicago and get extremely lucky and catch the Empire Builder to Minneapolis an hour after scheduled arrival. Or spend the night in Chicago and catch the Borealis at 11AM the next day.
I've taken long distance buses in many countries (none of them claiming to be the richest in the world) and I've never seen anything this sad. You have to jump through hoops to maybe get a chance to take the three required buses (that depart once or twice daily) to get from one regional capital to the other?
With this route I get a 12 hour Denver>Osceola trip, $136 for a coach seat/$314 for a sleeper. Then it's a 15 hour layover for a $119, 6 hour Greyhound trip. It's a shame that falls into the same trap that I had with the Chicago trains.
I checked again and you could also do the Zephyr to Omaha, which is scheduled to arrive at 5AM, and then you can have a choice of two routes: transfer in Sioux Falls or Des Moines. Both buses from Omaha are scheduled to leave within 2 hours of the Zephyr arriving in Omaha. The route through Des Moines is Greyhound so probably intended to be a transfer and would likely wait for the train (unsure, though).
2 hour window is pretty tight and I wouldn't count on the Zephyr to hit it, tbh.
Spending the night in Chicago is definitely gonna be your highest comfort option hands down, though.
Yeah my bad I didn't look too hard at the departure times for the buses.