What can you tell me about the “Orphan Train?”

I recently read a novel that followed a group of siblings who ride the “Orphan Train” from New York to different locales out West. Does the story have any basis in fact?   Larry Dye Fenton, Illinois Between 1854 and 1929, Eastern charity institutions placed an estimated 200,000 abandoned or orphaned children in homes throughout the U.S. and Canada. Most traveled by rail, hence it became known as the Orphan Train Movement. Linda Gordon’s The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction tells the tr