In our technology-laden era we are often surprised to realize that our ‘novel’ inventions are actually recapitulations of processes invented by biological systems eons ago. For example, in a recent copy of their in-flight magazine, Delta Airlines claimed to be the first company to implement the ‘hub-and-spoke’ system to sort the more than 500 million airline passengers that fly in the US alone. Passengers from around the world are collected into hub airports like that in Atlanta or Chicago and then sorted to their various destinations. The principal advantage claimed by this hub system is its ability to efficiently collect passengers in a central location and sort them to their final destinations in a timely, efficient, and energy-saving manner. Little did the worlds' airlines realize that they had stumbled on a hub system used for millions of years by the eukaryotic cell secretory pathway, the trans-Golgi network (TGN), to collect, package, and sort numerous molecules to their final cellular destinations. The seminal treatise published just 15 years ago by Griffiths and Simons [1] explained the TGN as a ‘specialized organelle on the trans side of Golgi stack that is responsible for the routing of proteins to lysosomes, secretory vesicles and the plasma membrane from the Golgi complex’. During the past several years, this simple concept has been expanded to include identification of the effectors – including proteins, lipids, various small molecules, and components of the cytoskeleton – that control the sorting capacity of the TGN. In this review, we summarize recent findings regarding new concepts of TGN structure and molecular dynamics and how they have affected our view of the TGN and the regulation of membrane traffic.