When I received my Lionel Conductor Door Greeter I was very disappointed, not in the way it looked but in the way it was packaged. It was a very fragile piece that arrived in many broken pieces to unclude its head, arms and feet. The light up lantern did not work and for some reason unknown to me, the switch was located on the bottom of the base which necessitated the user to tilt the Conductor to one side to expose the switch Underneath the greeter. I resolved the issue with the Seller and decided I would try to effect repairs. I bonded the pieces back together with bondo, paint matched his suit and pulled my modeling paint skills (not many) to try to make him look presentable not as a door greeter as advertised but as a layout greeter. While I put him together I felt it was a good time to mod him a bit more.
I replaced the battery operated lantern with a 110v incandescent lighting system and replaced the base switch with a toggle located on my train control panel. I also got rid of the fiberglass lenses on the lantern and replaced those with some amber marker lights i found at an auto store. I then decided to put a digital audio recording chip (cost about $11 at RS) into him to announce the layout greeting. The speaker for the audio I used was a fat boy speaker I found on the bay, since I did not like the quality of the one packaged by RS.
Here are some pics and a video of the finished project. Hope you like the finished project as much as I did salvaging this hopeless cause.
Pic showing speaker placement
Heres hoping the video is displayed......
