Sorry to hear about Loco2 being swallowed up.
A few years back, wishing I could still just walk up to a ticket office and get international tickets - and sensible advice - that way (as was the case even in Britain not so far back - at least at a few places), I discovered the ticket desk at the Swiss Travel Centre in London (in Covent Garden). They were able to issue tickets for not only Switzerland, but - at least - adjacent countries (probably lots of other countries, in fact, via the connections of the Swiss ticketing system?). I got tickets for Switzerland and Italy (including domestic Italian journeys) with no mark-up, and also connections between Britain and Switzerland, with "proper tickets" printed out for me. All very satisfying.
One complication, however, was that although they had machines to print out tickets on two sorts of ticket stock, not all combinations of stock and printing style were available - though what was printed, having been properly issued by what was in effect a Swiss Railways sales point, was obviously valid. Using their tickets, I was booked onto a Thello day train from Marseilles (I think it must have been), for a journey heading to Liguria, but with a break of journey for a night in Nice. So I was initially making an internal French journey on the Thello - which is allowed, though SNCF won't sell tickets for it and "regular" local tickets aren't valid on the Thello. When the charming ticket inspector came round, he took one look at the tickets I and my travelling companion offered him, noticed that they were on SNCF-type ticket stock, and said - correctly - that SNCF tickets weren't valid on Thello for that particular journey. He demanded fresh payment.
He had a reasonable amount of broken English, I can cope with a bit of French and Italian, and we had a lengthy tri-lingual discussion. At first he was insistent, but so was I; so he went away to think about it. Then he came back and said they really weren't OK - he'd worked the railways for many years, and never seen a ticket like it. After further discussions, he finally found a long reference number in small print on the ticket, tapped away at his little computer, and was amazed to find that the number was exactly what his machine said it should be for sitting in that seat. He graciously "accepted defeat" and went on for ages about what an amazing ticket it was, and how he'd have to tell all his colleagues when he got back to base. He asked if he could keep the ticket as a memento(!) - in fact I carried photocopies of all my tickets at the bottom of my luggage, for emergencies, and gave him a copy of it, for which he was profusely thankful. When we left the train at Nice, he stood on the platform and shook our hands with a big smile on his face, wishing us both a buon viaggio.
The next morning, when picking up a (non-Thello) train at Nice station to head over the border, who should I find standing on the same platform, switching trains in between rotas, but "my" ticket inspector! He recognised me, rushed up like a long-lost friend, and said he was the hero of his ticket-checkers' office after showing them my never-before-seen Swiss-issued Italian-stock ticket for an internal French journey on an international Thello train. I was quite touched by his Mediterranean warmth!