NJ Transit paid $4.4 million to purchase office space at its Newark headquarters that it had been leasing for two years but did not use, public records show.

The purchase price for the 10th floor of Two Penn Plaza East, on Raymond Boulevard near Newark Penn Station, was not previously disclosed.

According to public records, the purchase was recorded on Oct. 11 and includes 34,423 square feet of space in the building. The seller is Hartz Mountain Industries, a large Secaucus-based real-estate and development firm.

The NJ Transit board of directors approved the purchase of the space in July.

The agency had leased the space for two years from Hartz Mountain. In 2015, it entered a three-year agreement with the company for $2.2 million, with an option to purchase the space.

The agreement enabled NJ Transit to purchase the property below market value by Oct. 1. Its assessed value was $4.8 million, according to documents signed on Sept. 26.

The space has been mostly unoccupied since then. NJ Transit spent an additional $1.8 million to renovate the space to accommodate 150 employees who were supposed to begin working there in October.

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Nancy Snyder, an NJ Transit spokeswoman, said 85 staff members currently occupy the floor, and the agency is recruiting for additional personnel who will staff it. It also houses training simulators for positive train control, a safety system the agency is required by federal law install by the end of next year.

NJ Transit has been struggling in recent years to find the funding and personnel it needs to operate safely and reliably.

The Record and NorthJersey.com reported last month that NJ Transit lost 93 of its senior rail supervisors from January 2014 to July 2016. While 49 of them retired, more than 30 others sought better work opportunities in New York, Connecticut and Florida.

The agency also has hired relatively few locomotive engineers since 2015, personnel rosters show. It's lost one locomotive engineer a month to New York's Metro-North. Its new hires are barely enough to make up for those losses, much less the more than 50 who will qualify for retirement in the next two years.

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NJ Transit's regional peers, including Amtrak, Metro-North and the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority, have been hiring a significant number of locomotive engineers recently.

NJ Transit also owes Amtrak at least $90 million in back payments for its use of the Northeast Corridor.

And the agency has also been under review from the Federal Railroad Administration for its safety compliance. It is still under investigation from the National Transportation Safety Board for the September 2016 commuter train crash at Hoboken Terminal.

One person was killed and more than 100 others were injured in that crash.