Sunset nex-7 kit lens, any tips?

Well I did some reading last night on aperture and shutter speeds and thought I understood the basics. But then today I was making a train trip and around the time of sunset I made a bunch of pictures from out the train window. But when I started this task, I really didn't know how to apply my freshly learned knowledge.

I am moving inside the train, so my first thought was to start with the shutter speed and adjust the rest to it. But then I thought that I wanted to make a picture of a large landscape, so I started to doubt if I shouldn't start with aperture and take the biggest value because I wanted everything to be sharp. But then I thought that it was evening, so I should also change the iso setting. Though it was sunset and the light was quite contrasty, the sunset was pale and yellowish. So this was definitely a too dificult a task for a total noob like me.

In the end I'm not satisfied with any of the pictures I took. This was somewhat the best, but still, it doesn't look anything special compared to many other sunsets I saw on here:

I decided to do some postprocessing on it, first of all I cropped the picture to get rid of the reflection in the right top corner, while somewhat also making a new composition. Then I did some work on the levels and some on tone and color. Actually I most of the time use auto settings when doing this kind of stuff. In the end it still isn't a stellar picture, but it looks much more like how the landscape looked like. I'm sure there are many of you with much better editing skills who could create a much better end-product, but still, I'm curious how some of you pro's would have approached this situation, in steps, to get this scene right at shooting, not with post-processing. Any tips/help is welcome.