He was an Associate of the Institution of Locomotive Engineers and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.
[2] Ellis covered a broad range of railway subjects in his books, the best-known of which is The Trains we Loved (Allen & Unwin, 1947).
His obituarist in The Times commented that his Railway Carriages in the British Isles from 1830 to 1914 (1965, revised from an earlier book) "despite its near-obsession with matters lavatorial and ablutory ... was an epoch-making work".
Both of which were fictional, somewhat "voluble [and] long winded", and deeply based on an interest in railway operations, which was also assumed in the reader.
[3] His 1959 humorous book Rapidly Round the Bend was described as "[doing] for railways what Sellers [sic] and Yeatman had done for general history" (a reference to the authors of 1066 and All That).