William Ellis Morris (January 29, 1812 - October 15, 1875) was a Pennsylvania based civil engineer and railroad executive active in the mid-19th century. Little is known of Morris' education, but earlier in his career as a civil engineer he was employed to plan the Portage Railroad link over the Pennsylvania's Allegheny Mountains. The curious project of the Portage Railroad involved a scheme to use a locomotive to hall barges up one side of the mountain range so that they could drift down the opposite side. He later ran the Germantown-Norristown Railroad Company and subsequently the New York's Long Island Railroad - which from a point of near bankruptcy he developed into a world class transportation network. His cartographic work seems limited to his revision of Melish's map of Pennsylvania in1848.