ANAHEIM HILLS Dave Sheegog gazes thoughtfully at his back yard, planning out precisely where all the major components of his Disneyland-themed garden railroad should go.

Main Street Station will go in the left corner of the yard. Sleeping Beauty Castle will sit at the highest point, just above Triton Sea and Mermaid Lagoon. Big Thunder Station? That should go along the right wall, adjacent to the property line.

These projections lay the foundation for Castle Peak Thunder Railroad, a 1,370-square-foot utopia that encompasses 11 model trains, five themed lands, dozens of plastic figurines and replicas of five iconic Disney buildings.

Although he’s transformed his property into a theme park enthusiast’s dreamland, Sheegog, 51, remains low-key about the ever-evolving masterpiece.

“To me it’s just a garden railroad,” he says, staring at the backyard through floor-to-ceiling length windows in his dining room. “For what it is, this is exactly what I wanted.”

Dave Sheegog, an architect, is driven by his attention to detail. The trait has served him well in the 23 years he’s worked on residential, retail and recreational projects, and compels him to make his railroad as authentic as possible.

That trait also has pushed him at home. He’s taken paint samples into Disneyland to look at them, next to actual Disney trains, so the color for his model engines is an exact match. He photographs Disneyland landmarks and studies them so his backyard buildings are exactly to scale. And when he can’t find fonts that match those used at the park, he creates his own using a computer aided drafting program.

“It’s good,” says Dave’s wife, Frances Sheegog, 50. “It’s been an outlet.”

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Dave’s landscape plans started out simply enough. A fountain here. A few plants there. Maybe a tree or two to help mitigate the sound of cars buzzing along Serrano Avenue. Nothing Disneyesque.

But that vision took a twist in the late ’90s when he purchased a toy train from Morgan’s Big Trains Emporium in Huntington Beach.

Soon, the longtime Disneyland pass holder was hooked on model trains, and he set off to create a Disney-themed garden railroad in the back yard of his two-story home.

“It just dawned on me,” he says. “I live in Anaheim and I’ve always enjoyed Disneyland architecture and I’ve always enjoyed animation.

“It’s the perfect theme.”

In 1998, he built a 3½ -by-5 foot model of the back yard on the dining room table. In part, he wanted to plan out his ideas. But he also wanted to ease Frances’ nerves. Frances, who at the time was pregnant with the couple’s third child, worried that her husband’s train set would swallow up the kid’s play space.

“He kept saying ‘Oh, the rest will be grass,'” Frances says. “But I kept seeing the retaining wall get closer and closer to the house.”

Construction broke ground in 1999. Soon, Dave was immersed in details.

Snow White’s home sits atop a patch of grass surrounded by a forest of mini pine trees. It’s constructed from beige stucco applied to a plywood subframe, and topped with a thatched roof made of raffia palm strands that he purchased at a local fabric store.

A few feet away, a scene from “The Little Mermaid” unfolds. Dave explains the scene: Ariel is resting on a rock in middle of a lagoon, while Prince Eric, standing on the beach, beckons the Princess ashore. At the same time, King Triton is emerging from the waves and pointing his index finger toward the water, reminding Ariel that she belongs in the sea.

Dave builds everything to withstand the elements, including the winter rains and the Santa Anas that occasionally whip through his Anaheim Hills neighborhood.

The railroad’s mountain ranges are made of concrete – a feature that Frances once feared could be detrimental to their home’s resale value.

“As the concrete mountains started going up, I was thinking ‘Who is going to buy this house? We’re putting in things that will not move, they’ll have to blast them out to get them out,” she says.

“My husband, being the eternal optimist, said, ‘Obviously someone who likes Disneyland.'”

“It’s a selling point,” Dave says.

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Over the years, Dave tried to involve Frances and the children – Ariel, 18 (named for the Disney character); Meri, 16, and Philip, 14. And the family has created tiny movie posters that line a brick path leading to the backyard, and a mix CD of Disney tunes that plays in the background as the trains run. But, for the most part, Dave says, the yard has remained “Daddy’s project.”

Dave did leave a large swath of grass where his children could play. When it became apparent that the space was too small to accommodate the family’s three-swing play gym, he did what he had to do – lopped off the third swing.

While most of the back yard is built out, Dave says he has eight to 10 ideas swimming in his head at any given time.

One involves knocking out part of a stone-faced retaining wall near Tomorrowland. There, he’d build a room where the trains could be stored overnight. That upgrade would cost about $20,000.

Dave says he doesn’t usually track the hours or money he spends on his little world.

But, in a recent article for Garden Railways magazine, Dave wrote something that may speak to what he gets out of it:

“Some say that happiness comes when you are doing what you want to be doing. Building a project like this requires a lot of doing so I guess that I could legitimately call the (garden railroad) ‘The Happiest Place on Earth’.”