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Welcome to the wonderful world of old time railroading. A large scale CW layout sounds really interesting. MR ran plans for several civil war period freight cars in the late 60's. Haven't got my index to hand, but know it was between 66 and 70. One of the plans was for the more or less standard USMR flatcar. There were also plans for a stock car, box car, and Adams express car. This would be worth your while to track down. Also would suggest that you ask your local library to get you John H White's books on Freight and passenger cars. They have a lot of good pictures, plans, etc. The freight car book covers USMR equipment, esp. the flat cars in some detail. Also have some interesting info on early use of cabooses by USMR. The late great E.P. Alexander was extremely interested in this area of modeling, and almost all of his books have some pictures of C.W. era equipment as well as models of CW loco's etc. that he built. He wrote a book about modeling Civil War railroads as well which is hard to find these days, but would be worth while if you come across it. Alexander was a pioneer model railroader who worked mostly in 1/4" scale. He had some really neat C.W. stuff available. I last bought stuff from him in the late 70's. So his books, plans, etc are still out there floating around. Since Civil War period equipment was largely wood, with a few rare exceptions like the B&O iron box and hopper cars, I would suggest that you build up your cars out of strip wod. The larger scale would give a chance for some real nice detail in board by board construction. To keep the cost down you might cut your own wood, which would certainly be more practical in the large scale than in say HO. Metal parts were fairly limited in these cars, mostly nuts, bolts, grab irons (which were pretty minimal themselves) brake rigging (no air brakes tho of course) and truss rods when present. Even trucks had a large amount of wooden components. An interesting aspect of C.W. railroading that I've never seen modeled is track gauge. While many roads were standard gauge, many, including a lot of Southern roads were 5 foot gauge. Then there were the wide 6 foot roads, like the Erie. An interchange point between roads of different gauges were trucks were swaped under cars or freight off loaded would certainly make an interesting model. Hope this helps JB
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