You see? It works. You are almost there. There is a set and a setting, albeit bleak, and a traveller with a mysterious purpose. What happened, the reader wants to know, or what is about to happen? Why are they there? And from the beginning it was made clear that this is not fiction. This is real. There really is such a station, and there really was such a traveller, a writer probably, with a pen and paper in their pocket, or an eleven inch Macbook Air with eight gigabytes of RAM in their bag, how else would this get written?
The last but not the least problem of a book is that, given it has to have an end and a beginning, it has to have a middle, and no matter how you solve the first two problems, you could begin at the end for example, the middle always has to be in the middle, there is no way around that, you couldn't begin in the middle, because then it wouldn't be the middle. Or could you?
What the German writer from the interbellum didn't say was that in the middle there should be a woman. Who is she? Why is she there?