The fix was to remove the transLogger object when creating the transmissionsRepository mock. Because Mock takes a params[] argument, you can pass any number of erroneous additional properties and Visual Studio won’t provide intellisense telling you you’ve done something wrong because it has no way of knowing.
so I had to change this line:
transmissionsRepository = new Mock<TransmissionsRepository>(transmissionsContext, httpContextAccessor.Object, transLogger.Object);
to:
transmissionsRepository = new Mock<TransmissionsRepository>(transmissionsContext, httpContextAccessor.Object);