Welcome to the realm of the Merseyrail ticket office. Ask for anything outside the Merseyrail box and a lot of staff are lost.
I would disagree with that, I don't usually have any kind of issue with what they would ordinarily be expected to sell. Stations on the city line, fine. Stations in the wider area, all fine. Even for Frodsham, the default was to sell a £7 via Birkenhead - not the much more expensive "via any" which used to only mean via Warrington.
There are now three separate routings for this line - Birkenhead, Runcorn and Warrington. I can fully understand the last one not being interoperable as it's quite a way out, but the first two really ought to be. Making matters worse is that the £7 via Runcorn is only available starting from Lime Street, not from Liverpool Stations - hence the staff at James Street not being able to find it at first. Their own "via Runcorn" comes out at about £12!
They shouldn't have to go to such lengths to sell a basic (and hobbled) ticket from the city centre to a small town in the same city's wider region.
The poster up at Liverpool South Parkway would suggest that it's not only ticket sellers who are finding the lack of sensible interoperability a problem, but that some passengers may well have been financially caught out by a problem which shouldn't exist.
As an additional point to my original, to make matters worse later due to timing it would have been much more time effective for me to return to Liverpool via Birkenhead. But instead I had to wait for the TfW train, and remain on the train to Lime Street (when I would have at least chosen to change at Liverpool South Parkway).
