Recent marine propulsion diesel engines tend to become slower in speed and longer in stroke for the higher engine efficiency, and in these long stroke and slow speed engines the digital governors are highly recommended to be used. But, in the present digital governors only the feedback of the engine rpm-signal is used for the engine speed control. If the load torque of the engine can be measured or estimated and the torque feedback loop is added to the present digital governor, it is expected that the speed control performance of the digital governor will be highly improved. In this paper, a new method is proposed to estimate the load torque of the diesel engine from the measured signals of fuel oil and rpm. And it is also suggested that the Kalman filter can be used for the estimation of engine torque.