Stewart Joy, Beeching's economist, wrote in his autobiography of those times that he went to Edinburgh to examine the accounts and found a very early morning train from Berwick to Edinburgh which was shown as having some 100 passengers (and thus justified), which did not seem to tie with the receipts, so he checked further and found that only about 10 passengers were fare paying, the majority were rail staff, wages grades, reporting for duty and travelling free. However, the way the accounting was assembled just recorded passengers, without indicating if they were revenue generating or not.
A classmate at university was son of a senior manager, so he got a first class allocation as well, along with sleeper berth. He introduced me to having tickets made out as Penzance to Thurso, which effectively made it an all-line pass. He also said no ticket inspector ever nipped it, so it lasted as long as required.
In younger times back in Somerset we knew well a onetime driver from St Philips Marsh who had gone into business in the 1950s-60s as a travel agent organising trips to Ostend in his former homeland Belgium (I think he had been in the RAF in WW2, stayed and joined the railway afterwards). He principally took railwaymen, who he marketed to, they got all the travel part of the package free, both rail to Dover and the ship (Belgian state owned although not by SNCB but apparently valid), and just paid for the hotel. For most it was their first foreign travel.
