In this paper, a hybrid control scheme is proposed for marine diesel engines. This scheme ‎combines both linear active disturbance rejection control (LADRC) and an adaptive artificial ‎neural network, so-called Online ADALINE. The proposed scheme aimed to improve the ‎performance of marine engines by making the speed control system more stable and firmer against ‎disturbances. To handle the high nonlinearity, disturbance, and complication of operational ‎circumstances in marine engines, the advantages of both LADRC and ADALINE were utilized. To ‎describe the relationship between marine diesel engine speed and fuel injection, a modified mean ‎value engine model (MVEM) was used. Simulation experiments on a 12K98ME marine diesel ‎engine were conducted using MATLAB software depending on its mathematical model to verify the ‎effectiveness of the proposed scheme to control marine engine speed in various working ‎conditions, such as parameter perturbation, random disturbance and sudden dumping load. The ‎obtained simulation results proved the high effectiveness and distinct performance of the proposed ‎control strategy compared to the conventional linear active disturbance rejection controller.....................‎ Keywords:.............. Active disturbance rejection control; Adaptive artificial neural network controller; ‎Hybrid Speed Control; Marine diesel engine.