Fremont — Nebraska | Shared Latitude

A Platte River town best explored slowly, by open-air rail car, past cornfields and a lake full of bald eagles in winter. Lia fell asleep on my shoulder halfway through the ride and I didn't wake her.

Fremont sits about thirty-five miles northwest of Omaha where the Platte and Elkhorn rivers nearly meet, a town of twenty-seven thousand built around Dodge County’s rich farmland, and it has quietly become one of our favorite unhurried weekend stops in the state. Its best-known attraction is the Fremont Dinner Train, a set of restored 1950s rail cars pulled by vintage diesel locomotives along a slow loop through cornfields and pasture, and it’s exactly the kind of gently corny, entirely sincere thing that Lia and I can never resist.

The dinner train through the cornfields

We booked the evening run, which leaves from a restored depot downtown and takes just under three hours to cover the round trip, servers moving down the aisle with plated dinners while the landscape slides by at a pace slow enough to actually watch it — grain elevators, soybean rows, the occasional startled deer at a field edge. Somewhere past the halfway point the sun dropped low and lit up the whole car gold, and Lia, three glasses of wine in, decided this was the most romantic thing I’d ever planned, which I did not correct her on even though I’d mostly booked it because I like trains.

Vintage rail cars of the Fremont Dinner Train crossing farmland outside Fremont, Nebraska

Lake Fremont and the eagles

Just south of downtown, Lake Fremont and the surrounding recreation area occupy old sand and gravel pits that have filled in and gone wild, now ringed with cottonwoods and popular with local anglers. We came back in January on a different trip specifically for the bald eagles that winter along the open water here when the Platte itself freezes over, and counted at least a dozen from one overlook, hunched in bare trees waiting on fish. It’s not a famous eagle-watching site the way some Missouri River dams are, but it’s close, uncrowded, and free.

A bald eagle perched in a bare cottonwood tree above Lake Fremont near Fremont, Nebraska

Getting There

Fremont is a straightforward thirty-five-minute drive northwest of Omaha’s Eppley Airfield (OMA) via US-275, making it an easy half-day trip from a bigger itinerary rather than a standalone flight destination. A car is necessary; the dinner train depot and Lake Fremont are a few miles apart and there’s no local transit connecting them.