ERIE — GE Transportation plans to move its headquarters from Erie to Chicago by 2014, but will maintain its locomotive manufacturing plant and nearly all of the company’s employees at the Erie site.

About 50 of the 5,500 GE workers in Erie County will move to Chicago, where the company will eventually assemble a headquarters staff of about 150.

The company’s chief executive, Lorenzo Simonelli, said the company remains fully committed to Erie as a key manufacturing site, but is moving the front office to Chicago because its customers are global and more efficiently reached from a major city.

Simonelli said the company has hired 1,300 workers in the past year in Erie, and plans to spend $140 million on upgrades. The company has been based there since 1907.

GE has a plant in Grove City that employs 850 people. The company also is spending $35 million to move into a plant in Pine Township, Mercer County, which will employ an additional 150 people when it opens later this year.