Slight problems booking Russian & Kazakh Trains, any help would be appreciated!

[woshju]

I'm gonna travel from Moscow to Almaty by train on the 14th of December, with a stop in Astana. Using pass.rzd.ru I've decided the trains I wanna take are 084Ц Moscow-Astana on 14 Dec and 050Х Astana-Almaty on 17 Dec. I plan to book the first leg on pass.rzd.ru and the second leg on railways.kz. I checked the timetable for these trains on yandex which is reliable (I think), to make sure they do run on the day I'm travelling.

Here are the timetables (in Russian) 084Ц and 050Х.

I have 2 main questions:

1.
I believe the booking for these trains opens either 45 or 60 days before departure, but I've been checking back everyday for the past few days and there's been no new trains added? For example, the 084Ц train from Moscow to Astana for 6 Dec has been open for booking for quite a few days now, but whenever I search for 8 Dec onwards (084Ц runs every other day) it says "No trains on a given date". Does anyone have any idea why? And what day would the booking for 084Ц on 16 Dec start? There is a change in departure/arrival time from 6 Dec onwards, but Yandex says that the train still runs on every even day in Dec 2019.

Similar situation for 050Х on railways.kz - bookable for quite a while now for 7 Dec but search returns no results for 11 Dec onwards (050Х runs on odd days in Dec 2019, except 9 Dec).

2.
These trains would give me around a 9 hour transfer in Astana. Does anyone know how on-time these trains usually are? Is this transfer time long enough?

I'd really appreciate it if someone who know more than me on this could help me out! Thanks in advance!

[steven]

9 hours will be long enough. Dont know about your first question

[Milad]

The international timetable change is at the second weekend in December (7th/8th this year). In theory, booking should have opened by now anyway, in practice, it's quite normal that the booking of trains in mid-December is delayed a bit (this applies to both the CIS and big parts of Europe). Just wait a bit and check if it has opened from time to time.