Tucked away off Highway 126, on a network of railway tracks sometimes used to shoot movies, a local startup is testing what it says is the future of transportation: driverless freight trains.
Parallel Systems is using three miles of track outside Fillmore, Calif., to develop an automated, battery-powered railway car as a green alternative to the thousands of trucks that sit idling for hours at ports every day.
Down a dirt road and among fruit trees and farm animals, one of the gray and black prototypes sat silently on the test rails on a recent morning…