Intelligent fault diagnostic techniques are crucial for ensuring the long-term reliability of manufacturing. The process variables collected by sensors in real industrial systems typically exhibit diverse time scales and data features. To overcome the above issues, we propose a comprehensive model known as adaptive multiscale CNN and enhanced highway LSTM (ACEL). To begin with, multiscale features under variable operating conditions are automatically extracted by constructing the parallel convolutional module. Then, to selectively focus on the feature representation within the channels, efficient channel attention is introduced to downplay the channels with less important information. In addition, the bidirectional LSTM is designed to generate more fine-grained hybrid features based on contextual information and local features learned by the CNN. An enhanced highway configuration is designed to be used to bolster the global temporal dependencies. Finally, ACEL is applied to the Tennessee Eastman benchmark and CSTR simulation, and multiple statistical metrics show that the proposed model outperforms other advanced fault diagnosis methods.