AEN LDCE 2025-26 by Zone: Vacancies, Candidates and Pass Rates

There is no all-India vacancy notice for the AEN LDCE. Each zone and production unit counts its own AEN vacancies, issues its own notification, eligibility list, medical and viva, and publishes its own panel; RRB/Ajmer only ran the CBT for all of them in 2026. So the only honest way to judge the competition is zone by zone, from the letters each zone put on its website. We read 2025-26 AEN documents for five zones — Northern, Southern, East Coast, North Eastern and South East Central — and this guide lays out everything they show, including the seats they could not fill. Other zones and production units publish their own letters; five is what we read, not how many exist.

NR eligibility list 02.02.2026; SR written result 17.07.2026; ECoR marks disclosure; RRB/Ajmer letter 14.05.2026.

Southern Railway published the most complete record, so it is the best view of how a cycle narrows. Its written-result letter of 17.07.2026 counts candidates by community at each stage, and its panel of 05.08.2026 says what happened to every seat.

Every one of the 22 who cleared the CBT went on to the panel — and all 22 were placed against unreserved seats. The SC and the ST candidate who qualified had merit positions inside the unreserved 22, so they took UR seats on merit. That left the 3 SC and 2 ST seats with nobody to fill them. The panel says so directly: "Since there were no further eligible SC/ST employees, the 03 vacancies earmarked for SC and 02 vacancies earmarked for ST will remain unfilled". The one PwBD seat is carried forward to the next cycle because there was no eligible PwBD candidate. The panel is provisional under RBE 91/2018, subject to Supreme Court orders on reservation in promotion.

ECoR's result letter of 17.07.2026 forwards RRB/Ajmer's result of 15.07.2026 and says a list of candidates for viva, up to five times the number of vacancies category-wise, will be issued in due course. Its marks disclosure shows 27 candidates at or above the normalised 90 — more than the 16 seats. Viva was held on 20.08.2026 and the panel of 25.08.2026 (GM approval 24.08.2026) empanels 13 candidates against the 13 unreserved seats. The ST seat remains unfilled, and the two SC seats wait on proceedings kept in a sealed cover under RBE 13/1993 because of a pending case against one SC candidate. The panel also warns that seniority positions may change when the sealed cover is opened.

Northern Railway notified 34 AEN seats (UR 26, SC 5, ST 3) on 22.12.2025, six of them also reserved horizontally for PwBD candidates. Its eligibility list of 02.02.2026 names 558 eligible and 75 not eligible (our count of the list), about 16 eligible candidates per seat. The CBT result followed on 16.07.2026, and the viva letter of 12.08.2026 calls the 58 who qualified in the written test to viva on 18.08.2026 and 19.08.2026, subject to medical fitness under para 530(a) of the Indian Railway Medical Manual. Northern Railway did not publish how many sat the CBT.

The provisional panel of 19.08.2026 names 33: 26 against unreserved seats, 5 against SC and 2 against ST, so one ST seat remains unfilled. None of the PwBD candidates qualified in the CBT, and the panel carries the six PwBD reservations forward under Board letter E(GP)2022/2/20/PwBD of 21.06.2024. The panel is subject to the outcome of three original applications before CAT (Principal Bench), and one empanelled candidate's promotion is deferred until a current minor penalty ends. We give only these aggregates; the letters name individuals, and we do not.

North Eastern Railway notified 6 seats (UR 5, SC 0, ST 1, PwBD 0) on 19.12.2025, took applications through HRMS until 15.01.2026 and published its eligibility list on 20.04.2026: 227 provisionally eligible and 13 not eligible, by our count of the list. That is the steepest ratio among the five zones we read, close to 38 eligible candidates for each seat. We found no NER AEN result or panel by 29 September 2026. South East Central Railway's panel memo of 07.08.2026 fills all 5 seats (UR 4, SC 1), including the SC seat, after a viva on 06.08.2026; it describes the post in both pay systems, "PB-2 Rs 9300-34800 + GP 4800 / Level 8".

Southern Railway issued eight Group B 30% LDCE notifications for the same cycle (G25042 to G25049), and AEN had the most seats. The APO notification (G25042, 01.08.2025) is a scan: in our reading of it, APO had 5 seats — UR 4, SC nil, and a total of 5, which implies one ST seat because that cell is not legible — with one seat earmarked for PwBD.

Across every post and zone, RRB/Ajmer's letter of 14.05.2026 said 47,344 eligible candidates would be appearing: 23,898 scheduled on 24.05.2026 and 23,446 on 31.05.2026, at 50 centres in about 40 cities. That is who was scheduled, not who turned up. AEN sat in the morning shift (09:00 to 12:00, reporting 07:30) with APO, AEE, AFA and ASTE. An exam-analysis site reports 2,605 and 2,621 AEN candidates on the two dates (reported, not a Board figure).