I came to the orphan trains the way many readers do, through a novel a friend pressed into my hands. Afterward I wanted the history underneath it, and then I wanted to hear the riders themselves. This list follows that same path: a few novels, the histories that hold up, books for younger readers and the films worth an evening.
Novels
Orphan Train by Christina Baker Kline (2013). The book that introduced millions of readers to the subject. It braids the story of an Irish girl placed in Minnesota in the 1920s with a modern teenager in foster care, and the parallel is the point. If you read only one novel, make it this one. A version for younger readers, Orphan Train Girl, followed in 2017.
The Orphan Train Adventures by Joan Lowery Nixon. A series for young adults that began in 1987 with A Family Apart, following the six Kelly children sent west from New York. Older readers who grew up on it still recommend it, and it works well read aloud.
History
The Orphan Trains: Placing Out in America by Marilyn Irvin Holt (1992). A careful scholarly history of how placing out worked, who ran it and how it changed. If you want to understand the system rather than a single story, this is the foundation.
Orphan Trains: The Story of Charles Loring Brace and the Children He Saved and Failed by Stephen O’Connor (2001). A history built around Brace himself, honest about both the good the program did and its failures. The subtitle tells you the tone, and it’s fair.
For younger readers, and for everyone
Orphan Train Rider: One Boy’s True Story by Andrea Warren (1996). The true story of Lee Nailling, placed in Texas in the 1920s, told alongside the wider history. Short and clear, and it got to me. Many classrooms use it.
We Rode the Orphan Trains by Andrea Warren (2001). Firsthand accounts from several riders, gathered while they were still alive to tell them. If you want the riders’ own voices in print, this is the closest you’ll get.
Films
The Orphan Trains, American Experience, PBS (1995). The documentary most people mean when they talk about orphan train films. It puts elderly riders on camera telling their own stories, which is reason enough to watch it. Libraries often carry it on disc.
Orphan Train (1979). A television movie that dramatized a fictional party of children traveling west. It shows its age, but it was one of the first times the subject reached a national audience, and it’s a fair picture of how the story was remembered in the late 1970s.
Where to find them
Almost everything here is available through public libraries, including interlibrary loan for the older history books. Ask your librarian about local collections too. Many county historical societies hold small published memoirs by riders who settled nearby, printed in short runs and never widely sold. Those can be the most personal books of all.
A reading order that works
If you’re new to the subject, try the Kline novel first for the feeling, then Warren’s We Rode the Orphan Trains for the voices, then Holt for the structure underneath. Watch the PBS documentary somewhere along the way. By the end you’ll understand both how the system worked and what it felt like to stand on the platform.