The Ride HomeImagine you are on a train to a place you don't know, with hundreds of other children alongside you. At the next stop you get off and hundreds of adults surround you. You hear them talking and mumbling but you don't understand what they are saying. Some people point at you and grab your arms to see your muscles. Complete strangers come to examine you and determine whether they should adopt you, one of the orphaned train passengers, into their home. Orphan trains are a part of American history unknown to many. However, they have played a huge impact in the passage of different laws and the current foster care system. According to the Orphan Train documentary made by Ozarks Public Television and the Orphan Train Depot website, between 1853 and 1929, approximately 250,000 children were transferred from the Big East. from coastal cities like New York and Boston, to new housing throughout the United States and Canada. Most of them moved west to newly settled areas such as Texas and Missouri. At their peak, the orphan trains carried between 3,000 and 4,000 children per year. The first shipment of forty-two children was sent in 1854 to Michigan. All were six years old or older and were adopted by farmers who used them to pick apples. These children became the first documented foster children in the United States. There were two large societies that helped with orphan trains, the Children's Aid Society and the New York Foundling Hospital. The Rev. Charles Lauren Brace founded the Children's Aid Society in 1853 in hopes of taking in homeless children and teaching them skills to find them jobs. Later, he began placing his children in the countryside with new families. According to the article "Baby Trains" by Dianne Creagh, Sister Mary Irene turned ...... middle of paper ...... eighteen years old and was excluded from the system. There are not enough social workers for all the children in the system and sometimes it simply becomes impossible to care for all the children without forgetting some. Although it is becoming less and less common, it still happens. The orphan trains represent an unknown period in American history, where children were taken from urban centers and shipped west to start a new life. Many children had one or more parents still alive, but they did not have the means to take care of them. The siblings were separated and often never saw each other again. Some children found loving families, but others were abused and treated as slaves. The challenges children faced have helped shape laws and regulations regarding child protection, employment law, and adoption laws. This had its greatest impact on the foster care system and how it operates today..