No, they were not. Trains are good for taking large numbers of people from one place where they don't want to be to another place where they don't want to be. In certain situations that can be a useful thing to do, but you can't design a city around it.

And yet we created trains that are a more efficient way of traversing cities built around horses as well.

Why can't you design a city around it? It would be different than Houston or LA, but would that be a bad thing?