On Friday, 27 Jan 2017 at 16:55, Jude DaShiell wrote:
> Interesting, I put a vertical on a line to start an org-mode table and 

[...]

> followed by hyphen followed by tab.  I got onto line 4 in column 3 but 
> line one acquired all of the verticals from line 2 in addition to what it 
> already had.

There's no question there?  What you got is what is expected as you
defined a table as soon as you put a | at the start of a line and on
subsequent lines and a table has all rows with the same number of
columns. 
-- 
: Eric S Fraga (0xFFFCF67D), Emacs 26.0.50.1, Org release_9.0.3-241-gc3d67b