The software I used to generate my carcards is written in Perl, which generates a Postscript file which is then converted to PDF format by Ghostscript.
Was this a lot of work? Well, sort of. But I get the cards I like, exactly as I want them, without farting around with each card manually. I can get the AAR car routing rules for empties in place, taking into consideration the interchanges that I have on my railroad. Plus I get the nifty railroad logo fonts without much work.
If you'd like a copy of the software, please let me know. I think it should be fairly easy to get it running on your Linux box. I have no idea how much effort it would take to make it work under Windows. Mac OS X might be fairly easy as well. You'll be on your own to supply the Railroad Heralds font. And if you want the modern heralds, you'll have to modify the code to provide the font character mapping.
The data input is from an OpenOffice.org spreadsheet file, making input & editing pretty simple. Since OpenOffice is available for Windows boxes as well, if you sent me a roster file (using this file as the template), I'll send back the PDF files for you to print.