Scott Currier (love his email address!) is right insofar as mentioning
the cavernous unused space in most parlor reed organs.  Sadly, the
standard reed organ action would not be easy to outfit with solenoids
or pneumatics.

The keys press down directly on short "stickers" located under the keys
at a point not far behind where your fingers press.  The wind chest, and
the pallet valves that the stickers open, are right under the keys.
The key levers have no rear extension beyond their pivot pins (where a
piano key can be pushed upwards by a player action).

So, the only place to attach a player action would be up front, under
the keys, working in tension to pull the keys down.  But the pull-wires
would have to pass through the wind chest on the way to the keys.

Now, you could emulate the time-honored tracker pipe organ wind chest,
and drill a hole for each pull-down wire, and attach the wire to the
underside of its valve pallet.  No need to go on up to the key.  Use a
leather or other type of seal around each wire to prevent leakage, just
as in pipe chests.  This assumes your solenoids or pneumatics are
mounted externally under the keyboard (where your knees may have a
prior claim?).

The real problem would be putting this together and taking it apart,
since the typical reed organ action unscrews and lifts off from the
bottom of the wind chest, which is usually of one piece with the
reservoir bellows board.

With some ingenuity, the assembly-disassembly problems could be solved,
but as you can see it's not a rainy-weekend project.  Of course a
push-up player solves the problem instantly :-)

You might be able to fit the magnets or pneumatics *inside* the chest,
above the bottom board -- if so, just as easy to take apart as the
original.  Or maybe fit a second set of pallets behind the manual set.

There are player reed organs, some of which *might* be designed around
the typical action and could show us how to do it, if I've overlooked
some reasonable solution.  But the Orchestrelle is a complete
re-[over-?]-design, radically different from the simple and compact
reed organ.

A keyless player reed organ doesn't even need pneumatics -- just copy a
player piano action as far as the valve, whose suction is applied
directly to the reed note channel rather than a pneumatic.

Now -- I do own an old Wurlitzer Orgatron, which uses conventional
electric pipe organ keyboards to play a chest of reeds via electro-
magnets.  I actually did start a design for computer-interfacing
the reed magnets, which use about 15 volts DC, ideal for solid-state
control.  (I will gladly give this organ to anyone who comes to Chicago
with a vehicle and strong friends.)

Mike Knudsen