I'll re-post what I tell people:
We get someone like you every week that comes back to the game and wonders what happened to their characters. Well, this happened - many of the servers were merged and people had the option to move their characters over:
https://forums.lotro.com/en/game/art...e-announcement way back in August 3, 2015.
However, this process was not automatic. Once a person logged into their account, they could move their characters over via the world transfer system. When they did the data server upgrade back in 2019, it made the old data incompatible. Because of this the transfer system was shut off until they could come up with a new system.
And eventually they did with new policies back in May 2020:
https://www.lotro.com/en/worldtransfer. However, it is currently only available for active worlds. They still have not been able to "revive" the system you are asking for. They are working on it, but their priority has shifted to performance issues. Whatever content that is available to your account is still available for you to use for any new character, but you will have to wait until they finish working out the problems of the transfer on the test realms before you can get your characters on live servers.
You can follow whatever status they are at here:
https://forums.lotro.com/forums/show...orld-Transfers