I saw one of these in Putnam, Connecticut, many years ago, a Steinway
"Vertegrand," normally about 52 inches high, in a birdseye(?) maple
case about 6 feet tall.  I wish I had noted the serial number, but it
was certainly an early one, with a wooden tracker bar and DC motor.

Many player action manufacturers, including Aeolian, started out using
primitive stacks occupying nearly the entire space beneath the
keyboard, and placing the pedal bellows behind the soundboard.  But to
put an electrically-powered Welte Vorsetzer-type pump back there would
have made the piano case much too deep to fit through many doorways.
So the alternative was to extend the case upward.  More-compact stacks
followed, leading to the conventional positioning of components.  One
of these remarkable instruments is pictured on p. 334 of Bowers'
"Encyclopedia of Automatic Musical Instruments."

Jeffrey Wood