A Californian architect is building a beautiful miniature Disneyland in his backyard. This way you can visit it for FREE

Instead of traveling to Disneyland, a Californian architect has built the happiest place on earth in his own backyard – and he’s letting visitors in for free.

David Sheegog, 65, has spent 25 years creating a miniature replica of a Disneyland railway in his modest backyard in the Anaheim Hills suburb, calling it Castle Peak and Thunder Railroad.

Sheegog grew up just steps from Disneyland watching the fireworks shows from his front yard with his parents, and when he had his own children he was inspired to create a magical experience for them.

He started with a model on his dining room table, but over the years he expanded to cover every inch of his garden, including Snow White’s house, Splash Mountain and Sleeping Beauty Castle.

He told DailyMail.com: ‘My favorite thing isn’t something we’ve built, it’s seeing people enjoy it. When we have open days and I see families interacting, sometimes I just sit on the couch and watch the people.”

A trained architect, Sheegog approached his dream with a meticulous, planned approach.

His first step was to ask his wife Frances if he could take over their backyard.

She agreed and instituted one rule: there had to be space in the middle for their now grown children to play.

Permission granted, he began designing.

He said: ‘We were homeschooling our children and I thought the railway might interest them and be something they would want to pursue.

“As they got older, I thought they might be interested in electronics or gardening. It was intended as a kind of living laboratory.

“But it turned out they were all more interested in playing with their friends, so it became Dad’s project.”

He told the Orange County Register, “I built a model of the whole thing that took up our dining room for a year. We had to eat in the kitchen.’

Luckily, the entire Sheegog family is obsessed with Disney. Sheegog once worked at Disneyland on Davy Crockett’s Explorer Canoes and the couple even named their daughter after Ariel from The Little Mermaid.

Initially, Sheegog started with a commercially produced model train set, which he modified to create detailed miniatures of all five Disneyland trains.

He was so obsessed with details that he even color-matched the paint samples to the real trains.

Sheegog had high ambitions for his designs, he said The LA times: ‘Most garden railways I’d seen, people had bought ready-made kits of little plastic buildings that were all about 12 inches by 8 inches.

‘They look like ready-made little buildings, like a barber shop. No.’

He added: ‘I wanted to build this from scratch and wanted them to be impressive, about six feet wide and four feet high. Or in the case of one of our castles, 2 meters high.

“I had to plan these and determine where the main buildings would be.”

He started construction in 1999 and showed the first version to his friends and family in 2000.

As the project has expanded over the years, its techniques have become increasingly high-tech.

Some features he built from sets, others he created from scratch, and some he 3D printed in recent years.

He added Sleeping Beauty Castle, the Haunted Mansion, Splash Mountain and Snow White’s village, as well as references to almost every Disney or Pixar film from 1937 to 2021.

The couple don’t like to discuss the cost of construction, but estimate it came to about the same price as installing a swimming pool.

He told the LA Times, “We’re not rich people here, and I’m trying to find a way to retire because there’s no way to do that right now.”

Occasionally visitors ask how much it would cost to hire him to build a Sleeping Beauty Castle for them.

He said, “They think you can do it for $300 or $400, and I say, ‘It’ll probably cost about $70,000 to rebuild that thing.’ It takes someone six months of their life to build that.”

In 2015, Sheegog and his wife began opening their garden to the public for a few weekends a year, with tickets selling out almost immediately.

Admission is free, partly because the family does not want to attract the attention of corporate lawyers.

He told the LA Times: ‘There was a woman here once, and she was almost a hundred. She worked at the park on opening day, when Walt Disney was there, and worked at the park her entire life.

“She had a whole crowd around her just listening to stories about what it was like. She started to cry. While she was talking, she relived her life when she was twenty years old, her first love, where she met her husband.

“All these memories are coming back, and a lot of people who come here are like that because we’re in Anaheim.”

Although Sheegog hopes to retire this year, he has no plans to halt the project’s expansion.

He designs two interactive experiences, complete with laser shows, hologram animations and live actors.

He said: ‘We grew up with the park and it has a certain sentimental place in your psyche. People just want to be there, and our place provides an outlet for that.”