a gravy train

A state, position, or job in which one makes an excessive amount of money without expending much or any effort. I'll be on the gravy train once I get paid from the settlement of the lawsuit! My brother ended up on the gravy train when he married his wife, whose family owns one of the largest oil companies in the world.

COMMON If you describe something as a gravy train, you mean it is an easy way of earning a lot of money over a long period. Software companies realise that the gravy train can't go on for much longer as the recession causes prices to fall. The boardroom gravy train continued to roll happily along yesterday, with news of pay-offs to three executives totalling nearly 1.4 million pounds. Note: You usually use this expression in a disapproving way. Note: In the United States, `gravy' was slang for money or profit. Railway workers invented this expression in the early 1920s to describe a regular journey which provided good pay for little work.