Abstract
This article is dedicated to present the most common word-formation strategies in German railway specialist terminology. The presentation of the most productive morphological nomination strategies in the analysed area is preceded by a short historical outline of the railway industry in Germany. The adumbration of the historical background and hints regarding the current EU environmental plans for railways are intended to expose the importance and relentless currency of the analysis undertaken here. The presented examples, which were extracted from the most extensive industry terminology database, RaiLLexic, have been correlated with their Polish equivalents. This contrastive procedure allows, going further, to draw conclusions about both language systems within which the professional terminology described here is constituted.