There’s a place in Vicksburg where it’s always Christmas.

Wreaths are permanently draped from the elegantly lit buildings that line the sidewalks. Santa and his band of reindeer are frozen in time on a black rooftop. A Christmas tree adorned with bright ornaments sits in the middle of town.

It’s a cheerful aura of constant delight, and it just so happens to be in the model train room of an undertaker’s house.

In an upstairs nook inside Charles Riles’ home, this perpetual holiday lives. Two long tables with sets of train tracks crisscross around miniature gas stations, water towers and houses with miniature limo drivers, priests and conductors residing over the whole micro-society.

“Every day in this room is a good day. It’s Christmas,” Riles said. “This is a fun place up here.”

Riles, a Vicksburg resident and undertaker for Riles Funeral Home, has collected model trains since he was a small child. With a grandfather who was a conductor and a father who worked on trains as a machinist, it’s easy to see how his love affair began.

The affable undertaker went so far as to move into a house near the train tracks so that he could couple his model trains with the real thing.

“We built this house out here by the tracks,” Riles said. “When we first moved out here it was always a race between me and the train to see who was going to see each other first.”

Riles has accumulated hundreds of trains in his lifetime, from Lionels to the expensive German LGBs, and his collection is estimated to be worth more than $250,000. His wife is the engineer who gets the models running, while he acts as the worthy conductor.

“The Lionel trains are the ones that I like to play with because you can see them,” he said. “I can pretty well put it on the track without having to have my glasses or a magnifying glass.”

The room is filled with stacks of trains in boxes and snakes of electrical wire that hang from under the tables of his tracks.

“When I was putting this together, and my wife and I were working on it, so many of my friends were going to the clubs, going to Jackson to see a ball game, and we were playing with trains,” Riles joked. “It’s real therapy. You don’t get much exercise, which is right down my alley.”

Coming home from a day filled with death and loss can undoubtedly take its toll on a man. But Riles has created a therapeutic escape in the cozy upstairs room where his childhood hobby blossomed into adulthood.

“I can come up here and I can close that door,” he said. “I don’t hear the dog barking. I don’t think about the sadness that I’ve seen during the day.”

But as an undertaker, Riles still had to throw in a little bit of gallows humor to his collection. He’s placed a car accident on the side of the tracks, along with a funeral home and a cemetery a few stops over.

“They had a wreck up here. You can see them taking the people in the ambulance,” he said as he pointed to miniature medics. “They don’t make it, so they go over there to the Lastop Funeral Home with the hearse out front, and they ultimately will end up in the cemetery.”

For Riles, this serene permanence is as reassuring as popping open the box on a new model train.

It’s not just a hobby. It’s a connection with the past.

“Every time I come up here, I see my dad on Christmas morning telling me I got a new train from Santa Claus,” Riles said. “Every child loves a train, so that tells you what I am.”