Between 1854 and 1929, an estimated 200,000 orphaned or abandoned children in the United States, most of them from the East Coast, traveled by train to towns and cities across the nation and were made available for adoption. Andrea Warren documents the personal stories of eight children who rode the Orphan Trains, noting that all of the surviving Orphan Train riders are aging, making the task of recording their experiences now a critical one. Each of these eight was fortunate to end up in a loving home, although there were a few frightening starts. Some people saw the Orphan Train children as a source of cheap labor, and there are many known cases of abuse and neglect. But the adult agents cared for the children on the train journey and tried to check on each child, both in the days following a placement and again a year later. Those visits made all the difference to several of these children, who were removed from their first placements and later ended up in loving families. Each of these riders felt some sense of abandonment over the course of her or his life. Some have been able to learn about their birth parents and to make peace with their emotions about the adoption. Others have not. Photographs of each individual as a child and today accompany these personal histories. Warren has also written about the Orphan Trains in the equally compelling Orphan Train Rider: One Boy’s True Story (Houghton Mifflin, 1996). (Ages 9–12)