Hi rhfil
Here are a few hints:
- use any video (youtube has a lot of content) as a base to extract the sound you wish
- use a free sound editor to edit / convert ANY sound media in a .wav file. I use Audacity
- the Märklin sound editor and its sound libary (huge and free) to extract the sounds you like (public announcements
- search on google for sounds (example: for French trains make a search of "sncf annonces gare". Most probably the same is true for any country.
- in the US, check things like https://motionarray.com/browse/sound-effects/

Because I am a Rocrail fan I have associated VLC Media Player (Free) with Rocrail to start playing any special sound automatically
Bells Cloches.wav (2,732kb) downloaded 4 time(s).
Coal loading ChargementCharbon1.wav (1,783kb) downloaded 3 time(s).

Not sure you can access those .wav files but if you are interested I can send to your email

So this works and is fairly easy. The difficult part (for me) is to produce the sound where I want on my layout. There are very inexpensive electronic modules to record and play sounds
Here is an example of an Arduino module for under 6€ https://www.ebay.de/itm/12345956...F%7Ctkp%3ABk9SR7jex8_zYw


I hope this helps
Cheers
Jean

I went to the ESU site but can't seem to access just the .wav files. Is there some way to open (unzip) the files without having one of their decoders to plug the files into?

No, the files are encrypted, and so can only be loaded into a decoder using Lokprogrammer software and hardware.