CACH
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The Chicago Area Consolidation Hub (CACH) is a package sorting hub for United Parcel Service. Located approximately 15 miles southwest of Chicago (see map), the facility is so large it is in several townships, primarily Willow Springs, IL but also Hodgkins, IL. It serves as a central sorting facility for packages traversing the country.
CACH has the square footage of 37 football fields (2,130,000 ft²) (198,000 m²), and has a perimeter of 3.1 miles. It employs over 8,000 people across 4 shifts. Packages are only handled during loading and unloading - all sorting takes place through a complex system of conveyor belts and push paddles, utilizing high-speed cameras to read the destination from a smart label to sort a package to its outgoing trailer.
The facility has a large center area with five "fingers" extending from two sides. In the center is the "primary", or unload area. There are 161 bays for trailers to be unloaded, although they are not always all used simultaneously. The second floor, or mezzanine, of the primary is the small sort, where smaller packages, usually a cubic foot or less in volume, are sorted into large nylon "forever" bags to reduce both additional handling and risk of damage or loss.
The "fingers" contain the outbound doors, where trailers are loaded. While a trailer can be unloaded in as little as 15 minutes, it may take a several sort shifts to completely load a trailer with packages for its specific destination. Once a trailer is loaded, it is transported to another hub or package delivery center. Trailers are usually pulled by trucks, starting at the UPS exit on I-294, the Chicago bypass. Other trailers are loaded onto trains at a BNSF railyard adjacent to CACH.
The facility sorts approximately 1.6 million packages per day. During the months of November and December volume can exceed 2 million.
Trivia
UPS' web tracking system used to list CACH as "CACH, IL", however, due to customer confusion (as there is no city named Cach, IL) it now lists the hub as "HODGKINS, IL".
Maps and Imagery
Google Maps satellite image